


Retrograde Motion

by Crunchysunrises



Category: Naruto
Genre: Friendship, Gen, Jutsu, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-10-30
Updated: 2018-02-12
Packaged: 2019-01-26 21:46:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 43,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12566900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crunchysunrises/pseuds/Crunchysunrises
Summary: From sixteen to eleven didn't feel like a big jump until she realized  that she was now the best ninja in their class. And that tiny Sasukehatesher for it.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Mornelithe_falconsbane](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mornelithe_falconsbane/gifts).



> None

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Title:** Retrograde Motion  
>  **Fandom:** Naruto  
>  **Rating:** Teen  
>  **Content Notes:** None  
>  **Disclaimer:** I have no rights to or within the Naruto franchises, copyrights, characters or trademarks. This is for fun, not profit.  
>  **Summary:** From sixteen to eleven didn't feel like a big jump until she realized that she was now the best ninja in their class. And that tiny Sasuke _hates_ her for it.  
>  **Additional Notes:** So maybe I got some of this up? I hope you like it!

“I’m going to be honest with you,” said Sakura, who was working very hard to keep her voice level. It was a testament to her skill as a medic nin that she wasn’t currently screaming her head off. Her shisho would have been proud of her. “I don’t think that I’m the best fit for this mission. There are several areas in which my skill set would be… inadequate.”

It pained Sakura to say it – almost as much as her limbs had pained her before she disrupted the feedback from the nerves in her arms and legs – but it was true. If she had possessed any of the required skills for this mission, she would not currently be lying here half pulverized and trying to reason with a madman.

Fucking Mangekyo Sharingan eyes, thought Sakura bitterly. Their genjutsu had been easy enough to break and their fire easy enough to avoid, but fighting Itachi’s fully formed Susano-o had been like fighting a tailed beast with her bare hands – and no prep work.

 _Sealing,_ Sakura thought, not for the first time. _There’s got to be a way to seal that fucker._

Too bad she didn’t know it.

 _If I get out of this alive,_ Sakura thought, not for the first time, _I’m going to become a fucking sealing **master.** I’ll be Uzumaki Mito come again. Jiraiya will eat his fucking heart out. Fuck!_

That last was because Uchiha Itachi, who had until that moment been almost entirely focused on cutting a seal into the floor of the cave with one burning hot fingertip, his face so close to his work that his nose sometimes brushed the ridges of it, had sat back on his heels to look directly at her with his burning red eyes.

Staring back at him – at his bloody tears, the red tracks down the length of his cheeks, the tangled hanks of greasy black hair hanging around his shoulders, and the pale flesh stretched too thin over his bones – sent a shudder through Sakura’s heart.

He looked… ghoulish.

For a moment, just a single solitary thump of her heart, Sakura feared that he wasn’t really the last Uchiha at all, just an evil spirit that had set up shop in a little boy’s body years and years ago and never left.

Then Itachi blinked, and he was once more simply the deranged S-class criminal that had kidnapped her during Naruto’s rampage. Vaguely, Sakura wondered where his partner was. She hadn’t seen him once since Itachi had taken her from Konohagakure.

“Who would you recommend to take your place, Sakura-san?” asked Itachi politely, briefly giving her his full attention, as if they didn’t both know that Sakura was trying to stall him. He was always so polite. Even when he had had his Susano-o pulverize every bone below her knees and elbows, he had been polite, not that Sakura had been in much of a position to appreciate it, what with the excruciating agony and all. After two heartbeats, he asked, “Kakashi-senpai, perhaps?”

“Yes,” said Sakura firmly. She tried to look like someone trustworthy and helpful, and not at all like what she really was: someone lying her ass off while she worked frantically to piece her shattered limbs back together. Bravely, she soldiered on, saying, “He was our jonin instructor – mine and Naruto and Sasuke’s. Out of all of us, Hatake Kakashi has the best chance of making a difference in Sasuke’s life.”

Itachi’s mouth twisted down, and his spinning eyes whirled faster. For a moment, Sakura dared to hope for a little more time while he considered it.

“No,” he said with finality. “Kakashi-senpai has already failed this mission once. There’s no use in him trying again.”

“Naruto?” asked Sakura. A shard of bone scraped past another one on its way to reforming her shin. It slotted neatly into its assigned place – the most complicated and personal of all 3D puzzle pieces. Repairing the ligaments and tendons in her arms and legs would be easier once she had her skeleton back in more or less the right shape. Belatedly, Sakura added, “Naruto was always Sasuke’s best friend as well as his rival.”

Itachi shook his head. “He has the kyuubi.”

Sakura didn’t know why that shielded Naruto from the best plans of deranged mass murderers, but apparently it did. She was more than a little jealous. Then she remembered the state that Naruto had been in the last time that she had seen him, and the feeling evaporated. Whatever the benefits, a shitty sealing job negated most of them.

Seeing Itachi’s attention return to his sealing array, Sakura quickly said, “What about Yamato-taicho? Back then, he was better placed than I was.”

“The shinobi that you call Yamato has an incompatible nindo,” said Itachi, his fingertips tracing the lines and swirls of his seal. It was just a working theory, but Sakura suspected that he was functionally blind. “And he has no hope of access to Sasuke while Sandaime leads Konohagakure. Factors beyond his control were held against him by the Sandaime.”

“Then someone from a ninja clan maybe?” offered Sakura, while eyeing Itachi’s handy work with increasing desperation. It was beginning to look alarmingly complete. “They always have pull.”

Bending his head over the seal that he was so painstakingly inscribing into the stone, Itachi very politely pretended not to hear her.

Sakura not so politely fumed.

Her plan, such as it was, was very simple: distract Itachi long enough to piece her legs back together, get free, stab Itachi with her poison-treated hairpin (originally a gift from Ino), and run away. She could fix her arms later – if there was a later. It was a good, solid plan despite lacking in several key details, such as how she planned to survive any part of it. Sakura had the nagging suspicion that, by his own standards, Itachi had been both kind and gentle with her up to this point. She expected that might change if she actually managed to stab or poison him.

Closing her eyes, Sakura concentrated on piecing herself back together.

She had the bulk of the work in her left leg done when Itachi made a little noise, and Sakura reflexively opened her eyes to see what had changed during her inattention. The answer was: not much. Itachi was still crouched on the floor next to a seal that was… Sakura couldn’t actually say _what_ it was. She only recognized a handful of elements, all of them Uzushio.

And that was a problem.

With her background, Sakura knew seals. She was no Toad Sannin, but she had grown up in the Uzushio Quarter, back when it had actually been populated by Uzushio refugees. The Strength of One Hundred Seal had been her mastery project in medical sealing. She should have been able to discern something useful about Itachi’s seal, but looking at it now – really studying it – Sakura realized that she had no idea what it did. That wasn’t a good thing. Worse, whatever it was, it looked like it was finished or close to it.

Crouching on his heels next to his seal, Itachi looked almost pleased, despite the way that his whirling sharingan eyes were steadily dripping blood.

Sakura’s stomach sank.

Whatever he was going to do to her, it was going to be soon, and Sakura didn’t even have enough of her legs fixed to try to run away.

Rising, Itachi approached her saying, “Allow me,” and Sakura immediately redirected her chakra, reshaping and sharpening it. When Itachi grabbed Sakura, his bare palms making contact with the soft skin under her arms and his fingertips digging into her flesh, she lashed out with a minor lightening jutsu, scrambling the electrical signals between Itachi’s brain and his body.

Itachi grunted and collapsed, dropping her.

 _All techniques are worthless before my eyes, my **ass!** _ Sakura thought gleefully. Even if she died in the next few minutes, she would go to her death holding this moment close to her heart: the first time that she finally managed to knock some sharingan wielding asshole on his ass.

With any luck, it wouldn’t be her last.

“This resistance is pointless,” intoned Itachi from his place behind her. His leg was twitching against the small of her back. “A few more minutes will change nothing.”

Sakura closed her eyes and said nothing. She needed to concentrate.

More softly, he said, “I would sacrifice even these eyes for the opportunity that I am giving to you.”

“To die in agonizing pain?” needled Sakura, despite her best intentions.

“Is that what you think we are doing here?” asked Itachi. He sounded genuinely surprised. “I am giving you the opportunity to try again,” said Itachi softly, wistfully, and at the tone of his voice, Sakura actually opened her eyes. Tipping her head to one side, she tried to look at Itachi over her shoulder. She could see most of his face and about a third of his twitching body. None of it was particularly informative.

“To try _what_ again?” she demanded.

“Everything,” he said, and he smiled. Even his teeth were bloodied. Sakura wished that she had been the one to do it. “If I could go back, I would look my brother in the eyes and tell him the truth. I would have been honest with Sasuke from the beginning.” He hesitated there and, looking lost, Itachi added in a smaller voice, “And… I would have stopped Kisame. I would have saved him too.”

It almost sounded as if he really thought that he could…

No.

That was _impossible._

But where _the hell_ did he get that seal?

“What truth?” pressed Sakura, because if there was one thing that Sakura had learned from Kakashi-sensei during that disastrous mission to Wave Country, it was the value of information gathering, especially when faced with impossible odds. All knowledge was useful eventually.

Itachi tilted his head to the side, catching Sakura’s eyes with one of his own spinning ones, and Sakura just had to think _‘Shit!’_ before his eyes began to pull at her.

She really _hated_ those eyes.

Sakura quickly countered his genjutsu, except it _wasn’t_ a genjutsu at all, and in the depths of her mind, Inner Sakura woke, already roaring their battle cry.

“You will protect my foolish younger brother,” said Itachi severely, his black on red eyes spinning, and although her Inner shielded her from the worst of his technique, Sakura still felt Itachi’s words sink into her, catching in her being like barbed fishing hooks. “No matter what the cost, Haruno Sakura, you _will_ protect Uchiha Sasuke.”

Then he cut her hand and kicked her into the seal, his bleeding hand landing on its outer edge a moment later.

Blood – his blood – flowed along the seal’s channels, the speed of its movements unnatural, and Itachi’s chakra flowed in its wake.

The last thing that she saw as she lay dying, as Uchiha Itachi’s blood surged through the seal inscribed into the stone, was a ragged crow. It opened its black beak to caw at her, and a sharingan eye blinked at Sakura from the back of its throat. A black, four-pointed shuriken was spinning, spinning, spinning, around a pinprick pupil in a sea of blood – _her_ blood; hers and Itachi’s – and Sakura screamed as the seal took effect, shredding her essence.

Death would have been a mercy.


	2. Chapter 2

Sakura slammed herself upright, gasping and shaking and utterly shocked to have woken up at all. In her ears rang a child’s screams.

There were footsteps, a door slammed opened, and Sakura lashed out, punching the moving… thing. There was a pained yelp, and Sakura rolled to the side, away from her attacker. A short drop before she clumsily landed on her knees – whole, undamaged, and _tiny._ And apparently she was the source of all the screaming.

Sakura immediately shut up.

Blinking hard, Sakura discovered that the moving things were her parents, looking younger than the last time that Sakura had seen them. Apparently, she had just gut-punched her mother.

Sakura would have felt bad about that – her parents were civilians, and thoroughly unprepared to be on the receiving end of chakra enhanced punches – but she was pretty sure that this was some deranged genjutsu of Itachi’s. She flexed her chakra, trying to dispel the genjutsu, and when that failed, Sakura momentarily reversed her chakra flow, disrupting it.

The first should have shattered the genjutsu, and the second collapsed it. Instead, nothing happened.

Sakura tried a more advanced technique, one that relied on the user’s mastery of medical ninjutsu and near perfect chakra control. It was a technique known only to Sakura, her shisho, and Shizune. There should have been no countering or circumventing it. The sharingan granted many abilities, Sakura knew, but an intimate knowledge of medical ninjutsu was not among them. Itachi would have fixed his eyes if it were.

But Sakura was still trapped in her childish body and still standing in a room that had been destroyed during the Sand-Sound Invasion. She was still looking up at her younger and very concerned parents. Sakura hadn’t seen them in years.

She was beginning to feel _uneasy._

Pushing that away – fear management was an integral part of being an active shinobi – Sakura bit her lip hard enough to make it bleed, much to her parents’ very vocal horror.

They hadn’t disappeared. Worse, she was still there.

Temporarily admitting defeat, especially in the face of all that parental love, Sakura let her mother hug her. A moment later, her father joined them, his arms going around both Sakura and her mother. And despite everything – including nearly five years as an active duty shinbi, Itachi, her recent horrifying death, and all her better sense – Sakura relaxed into her parents’ affection.

Vaguely, Sakura wondered if this was how Itachi’s family had died: trapped in their own minds, surrounded by their loved ones and a false sense of security as he brutally butchered their bodies.

Sakura flexed her chakra once more, disrupted it again, and again altered the flow of chakra in her brain before biting the inside of her cheek so hard that it bled.

And yet, there they were: her parents. Alive, well, and loving on her like she really was a little girl again.

It was sweet enough that, even knowing this had to be some sort of nefarious sharingan-based genjutsu trap, Sakura still healed her mother’s forming bruise as an apology for hitting her in the first place. The trickle of chakra that she used was so tiny and so well spun that her mother didn’t even feel it.

Not that there was much damage done.

Her body was smaller, impossibly weaker, and lacked all of the enhancements of her proper body. Even without her care, the worst that her mother would have suffered was a nasty bruise.

Sakura was nearly offended by that.

It was hours before she got her parents settled again, using claims of a nightmare. It was nice – the hugs, the concern, the cup of hot cocoa – but it wasn’t _real,_ none of it was. Sakura just wasn’t certain how Itachi was keeping her under. She had been on the receiving end of sharingan-induced genjutsu before, and while it had been difficult to break, she _had_ managed to break it. _Naruto_ had been the one who couldn’t break out of it. She and Chiyo had broken it for him. And yet, there she was: still trapped in one of the sharingan’s illusions.

The enormity of her failure _burned._

Eventually her parents went back to bed, and Sakura directed a trickle of chakra into the seal on the wall that served as her nightlight, making it light up. She hadn’t needed it in years, but its warm, golden glow was almost as comforting as Sakura remembered it being.

Late into the night, Sakura lay in bed, trying frantically to break the genjutsu that had been cast on her. Sakura was still trying to break the genjutsu when her small, exhausted body betrayed her to its mounting exhaustion and fell asleep.

Stupid, fucking _useless_ body.

 

 

 

If her body had worked at all like it was supposed to, Sakura would have killed her father when he woke her up the next morning. Instead, she fell out of bed a second time and her laughing father retreated to the doorway, blissfully unaware of her attempt at patricide.

“Is this what they’re teaching you at that school of yours?” he teased. “It’s ungraceful.”

“School?” Sakura demanded blearily. “Don’t go there. Haven’t gone in years.”

“It’s nice to see that your other dreams were better,” her father said, grinning. “But you’ve got to get up! You’ll be late!”

Sakura _hated_ being late. Of course, a genjutsu with details drawn from her brain would know that.

Sighing, Sakura got up anyway.

Her father disappeared from the doorway, leaving Sakura to try to figure out what to dress her smaller, younger body in.

There were no red qipao dresses in her closet, so she wasn’t supposed to be twelve yet or near graduation. And a quick check of her dresser’s top turned up the all important red ribbon. Whenever she was supposed to be, she hadn’t challenged Ino yet for Sasuke.

And she hadn’t yet invested in any shorts, which meant that all of her skirts and delicate little dresses were out. All of the shirts with cutouts in the sleeves were too impractical – as were most of her pants.

In the end, Sakura settled on a loose jersey, pale pink with the words “Angel Approved” stamped across the back in sky blue letters, and a pair of snug black pants that only came about three-quarters of the way down her legs. The pants seemed to be made from the same material as her shorts usually were, which made them the most practical item in her younger self’s closet.

Sakura remembered that she used to hate that jersey as a kid. It had been a birthday gift from her parents, one that had come a couple of years too late – or too early, depending on one’s view of the timeline. She had hated its practical cut, been appalled by its bold colors, and been embarrassed by the phrase printed on the back. Even back then, she had wanted Sasuke-kun to think her pretty.

 _And just look at how that turned out,_ thought Sakura, her mouth turning down.

Sakura shrugged out of her pajamas, yanking on her chosen articles of clothes with far more force than was strictly necessary. In her proper body, that would have ripped the fabric. In this smaller, weaker one, it didn’t even pop the stitches. She ran a brush through her hair, tied the all important red ribbon in the place her forehead protector usually went, and went downstairs for breakfast. Still unused to her smaller body’s limbs, the stairs were nearly a death trap.

Breakfast, at least, was good. It was exactly the way that she remembered her mother’s breakfasts being: egg on rice, steamed fish, and vegetables. And it was as tasty as she remembered her mother’s cooking being. Sakura wolfed down her portion and collected her childhood bento box.

Sakura had carried that lunch box all six years of her academy career. She had even carried it to practices on Team Seven until a stray fireball had melted it. Her lunchbox should have felt familiar and comforting to her, but while its weight was familiar, her lunch box’s scuff marks were all wrong. It didn’t have _enough_ of them.

 _Because I’m not rivals with Ino yet,_ Sakura realized. Their rivalry had been hard on her everything.

Pushing away her disquiet, Sakura smiled brightly.

“I’m off!” chirped Sakura. “I’ll see you later!”

“Have a good day!” chorused her parents, and Sakura smiled again for her fake parents before she tripped out the door and down the front stairs to the street below.

 _I need to go somewhere quiet – maybe one of the practice grounds – and break this strange technique,_ thought Sakura, as she emerged onto the pavement, and then felt light-headed. In her head, there was an ugly twist and her thoughts rearranged themselves. Those hooks in her psyche dug into her brain, tugging her towards the academy… and more importantly, Sasuke.

She had to protect him.

He was foolish and weak and so, so precious. Sasuke was _everything._

Sakura went cold.

That, Sakura knew, was no sentiment of hers, and neither was the swell of love – wild, wounded, _brotherly._

Sasuke was a bright, shining thing in her life – the _only_ bright, shining thing in her life. She had to protect Sasuke, no matter what the costs.

Sakura pushed back against those thoughts, Inner Sakura rising up to crush a swell of foreign desperation. She had thought them, felt them, but they weren’t _hers._

Itachi’s will was as unforgiving as the sun in Suna, but Sakura’s will was no mean thing either. Sakura raged against the compulsion, pitting her will against Itachi’s, but the barbed hooks were so deeply embedded into her brain that not even Inner Sakura could get them out, though she tried.

For now, Sakura was stuck. She would obey the compulsion, and Inner Sakura would keep the worst of Itachi’s technique at bay until she could figure out how to remove it in its entirety from her brain.

Sakura went to the academy, but she didn’t go there willingly, much less happily.

The run to school was breathtaking – and not just because Sakura was jogging.

The Uzushio Quarter was bright and alive and vibrant in a way that it hadn’t been in years, not since the Sand-Sound invasion. All of the buildings were once again painted cheerful shades of blue and green and pink, colorful tiles picking out waving trees and swirling waves, flying birds and swimming fish. They drew the eye to the district’s walls… and away from the seals that circled the windows, doors, and archways of almost every building in the district.

Friends, neighbors, and even passing acquaintances that she hadn’t seen in years – most dead, some moved away, many barely remembered – waved or called out to Sakura as she ran by and, unexpected tears stinging her eyes, Sakura waved back, breathlessly shouting cheerful greetings as she slowly jogged past. She hadn’t realized that she remembered – or forgotten – so many things about the old district. She hadn’t even realized how much she had missed it.

 _But what would have been the point?_ wondered Sakura, as she angrily swiped away her tears. _What’s gone is gone._

Except, apparently, in genjutsu; there, home was the same as it always had been, as it always should have been.

It was a long run from the Uzushio Quarter to the Ninja Academy – the length of the village, in fact – but when Sakura finally got there, wheezing and out of breath, the academy was… exactly as it had always been: enormous, battered, and defensible, although that last was only visible to her now. Ghosts of her past milled in the school yard – Hinata and Shino were standing together near the front doors, while Ino held court over a gaggle of little girls… and Shikamaru and Choji, who just happened to be respectively napping and snacking within earshot of the blonde. Neji was loitering near Hinata and looking pissy as all hell about it. Naruto slouched on the swing and glaring at everyone indiscriminately.

There was no sign of Lee, Tenten, Kiba or Akamaru. Or of Sasuke – a thought which brought all of Itachi’s seething desperation surging to the forefront of her brain again, despite her Inner’s best efforts to beat it off. There was just so _much_ of it.

Sakura was wrestling with that – she was struggling to crush Itachi’s craziness down to acceptable levels and force it to the back of her brain – when someone knocked into her shoulder hard enough to send her careening into the fence.

Sakura caught herself with her face.

At least that shut Itachi up.

Peeling herself from the wooden boards, Sakura looked up in time to see Kiba pelt past her without a word of apology or even a glance.

It was _weird_ to see him without Akamaru. _Wrong,_ as everything had been wrong since she had woken up in her childhood bedroom – and her childhood body; mustn’t forget the body.

And had Kiba really been such an asshole to her when they were… whatever age they were?

If that part turned out to be some shred of memory gleaned from a forgotten corner of her mind, Sakura was going to punch him – just as soon as she saved herself from this genjutsu and the madman holding her under it.

“Sakura!” shouted a girlish voice, and Sakura automatically looked.

Ino was waving an arm at her.

“Hurry up!” shouted the Yamanaka. “Or we’ll be late!”

It didn’t really matter – it was all just an illusion – but Sakura jogged across the courtyard anyway, cursing her younger body’s slowness. Had she really been so easily winded?

Ino led Sakura inside, taking her first to their lockers and then to their classroom. From that, Sakura discovered that they were in their second to last year at the Shinobi Academy. From the date carefully written in the top right hand corner of the blackboard, Sakura learned that she was eleven years old. Apparently, she had recently had her birthday.

 _Happy belated birthday to me,_ thought Sakura and scowled.

Sitting through morning classes afforded Sakura the opportunity to consider her failure to break the genjutsu from multiple angles. What it boiled down to, Sakura decided, was the fact that, mangekyo sharingan eyes or no, she _could_ break Uchiha Itachi’s genjtutsu. She had done it before, and she could certainly do it again. Except last night, she hadn’t been able to dispel the illusion – perhaps because it was no illusion.

She might really be here, trapped in her eleven year old body and on a mission for Uchiha Itachi.

 _Fuck,_ she hoped not. Sakura had liked herself, and she had liked what she was working to become. She had loved her life. If she had to do it all over again – if she was really eleven again –

Sakura put her head down on the desk in front of her and willed herself not to cry.

She didn’t know how long she had slumped there – or how long she might have slumped there – before a small hand patted her back.

“It won’t be that bad,” whispered Ino. “I’ll help you, Sakura.”

 _What won’t be that bad?_ Sakura wondered. Straightening, Sakura listened more carefully.

Apparently, end of year evaluations were upon them. Starting on Monday, while Suzume-sensei and Iruka-sensei met with individual students to discuss their progress, strengths, and weaknesses, the rest of the class would be doing conditioning with Mizuki-sensei and the rest of the fifth years.

Well, good. This body definitely needed conditioning. If Sakura was really stuck with it – and she shuddered just imagining it – but _if she was,_ then she wanted it to be at least as fast and strong as her real body was.

And in the meantime, Sakura could relearn how to walk and run and throw in this body. Just thinking about that – about how much she had lost when Uchiha Itachi had stolen her life from her – made Sakura want to cry again.

Her eyes stung with tears, and she bit the inside of her cheek hard enough to taste blood, but she didn’t cry. Sakura didn’t do that sort of thing anymore, not since she had reported Uchiha Sasuke as a missing nin.

And it could always be worse.

She could have stayed dead.

Tsunade-shisho would never have forgiven her if she had stayed dead.

Thinking of her master, of her strength and determination despite her terrible luck and her unending grief, Sakura straightened. New strength flooded her heart.

She could do this.

Probably – no definitely. She could _definitely_ do this.

She was a proud shinobi of Konohagakure. She was the second disciple of the Godaime Hokage! And she was the heir to all of the power of the Slug Sannin. Even if she was unmoored from her life, eleven again, and alone, she wouldn’t be anything less. She would adapt and survive and fucking _thrive_ in this new life of hers. And she definitely wasn’t going to _lose_ – not to time or herself or Uchiha Itachi, when she saw him again, because one way or another, she _was_ going to see him again. (And when she did, she was going to break his pretty fucking face! Cha!)

But first… she had to survive being eleven again in Sandaime’s Konohagakure.

 _I know things,_ Sakura thought unhappily, _information if not the exact course of future events. I should probably tell someone. And maybe see if they’ll give me back to Tsunade-shisho… or even Kakashi-sensei._

Just thinking it brought back all of Itachi’s dizzying desperation. Those hooks dug into her brain again, twisting her thoughts around themselves.

If she told them about her future, then she would have to tell them about Sasuke – there would be no leaving him out. Yamanaka Inoichi was too thorough for that, Nara Shikaku too clever, and Morino Ibiki too paranoid. She _couldn’t_ tell about Sasuke – about what he’d become or how he had died. She had to protect him, no matter what.

Even as she thought them, Sakura knew that those were not her thoughts. It was not her love coursing in her veins. But even knowing that those thoughts and those feelings was Itachi’s – and even with all of her experience tamping down on her Inner’s mood swings – Sakura still had trouble crushing Itachi’s compulsion down to manageable levels.

 _But if even thinking about it makes me this crazy, then I really **can’t** tell them anything,_ thought Sakura, her eyes fixed on the back of Sasuke’s messy head.

Not saying anything would make her a sleeper agent at best, a spy at worst. As it was now, the Council of Elders would see her tortured to death for that in the name of extracting information… and possibly shutting her up, considering some of the things that she had heard about them since becoming Tsunade-shisho’s apprentice.

She was no one to Sandaime Hokage, and she could expect no aid from that quarter. Tsunade, Shizune, and Kakashi didn’t even know her yet. She had grown up as Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji’s playmate, but it would be foolish to expect aid from the Yamanaka, Nara, or Akimichi clans. They were all smaller clans, and despite the positions that their respective clan heads held within the village, their political power was limited. At eleven, there had been nothing about her to suggest that she might be someone worth knowing someday, much less someone worth burning political capital to protect.

All of her successes and good deeds, all of her friendships and camaraderies, the reputation that she had made for herself, and the respect that she had earned were gone, washed away with her missing years. Even all of her growth, personally and as a shinobi, had been taken from her.

She had nothing, she was nothing, and she had no one.

Not even when she had been at her absolute lowest after Team Seven had things been as bad for her as they were now.

 _Friends all around,_ thought Sakura grimly, _and not one of them is really mine._

It was impressive how thoroughly Uchiha Itachi had fucked up her life without even trying. She had just been collateral damage in his unrelenting drive to save Sasuke, which come to think of it, was weird. Common wisdom held that Itachi had slaughtered the entire Uchiha clan just to see if he could.

Apparently, he could.

Except all _should_ have included Sasuke, which it hadn’t; if the gibbering puddle of crazed panic at the back of her brain was to be believed – and Sakura couldn’t imagine why it wouldn’t be – that was the absolute _last_ thing that Itachi wanted, and he was willing to sacrifice himself, her, and the future that she had come from to see his will done. That was an awful lot of effort to go to for someone that you planned to murder for the sin of being born an Uchiha.

It didn’t make sense and, had she been in her own bright future, Sakura would have pursued that line of thought. Instead, she temporarily tabled it in favor of figuring out what she was going to do – and how she was going to survive this mess.

As much as it pained her to think it, the easiest thing – the safest thing – might be to go missing nin for awhile; just long enough to find Tsunade and Shizune, at least, and ask them to fix her brain. But even considering that as an option available to her was enough to bring Itachi’s compulsion roaring back to life. If she left the village, then who would protect Sasuke?

 _What am I going to do?_ Sakura wondered. _What **can** I do?_

She was stuck.

 

 

 

Taijutsu practice that day was an exercise in humiliation.

The less said about that the better.

 

 

 

In the end, Sakura decided that she had to start somewhere.

If she could get rid of the compulsion that Itachi had planted in her head, then she would have _so_ many more options. So, objective number one: fix her own brain.

In her time – the time that she was originally from – such a resolution wouldn’t have been much help. At the beginning of her tenure as Hokage, Sakura’s master had banning the use of mind altering jutsu and compulsion techniques on Leaf nin by Leaf medic nin. Those were the sort of shortcuts in medical care, her shisho had said grimly, that ultimately weakened the village and cost lives.

Accordingly, all of the information on those techniques had been removed from the medical section of the general library and moved to the smaller, hidden library in ANBU HQ. Those techniques had sunk into the sole province of ANBU’s Intelligence and T&I departments. Ino had been really good at them.

But if they had been banned from general use by the medical corps by the Godaime Hokage, then it meant that they were still in use by the Sandaime Hokage’s medical forces. Everything that Sakura needed to fix herself was waiting for her in the medical section of the general library. She just needed a reason to start hanging out there again – and if that reason paid, so much the better.

So that same afternoon, Sakura stopped by the hospital to pick up information packets for the hospital’s various medical programs. She already knew what she was going to go out for – the field medics’ corps, of course – but it was important to look like she was exploring her options.

It was only an abundance of caution, drilled into her across several years of being a sitting Hokage’s apprentice, that made Sakura read and then reread the various forms’ fine print before she signed anything. And with every reading, her stomach got tighter and sank further. It was somewhere around her knees when Sakura finished and sat back in her seat.

The position of field medic had been created during the Third Shinobi War under the direction of Senju Tsunade. After the Third Shinobi War had ended, and without Tsunade to champion it, the position had apparently sunk first into unimportance then mediocrity; it became a nice idea, rather than a necessity.

As Senju Tsunade’s apprentice, Sakura _knew_ that. And as her apprentice, Sakura knew that it wouldn’t be until the Godaime Hokage came to power and enrolled her apprentice, a then thirteen year old Haruno Sakura in the medical corps, specifically in the position of field medic, that the field medics’ corps would once again rise to become a necessary and respected branch of Konohagakure’s medical corps. Its members would be considered the elite among the medical ranks. Any semi-competent medic nin could save a life in a hospital. Only someone with real skill could save that same life while up to their knees in mud and while taking enemy fire.

Sakura had always been proud to be a field medic. Making field medic had been the first tangible step towards her dream. Now, though, to be a field medic was to be a joke. To know academically that it would be that way was one thing. To _see_ it all but written out in front of her – to know that when she re-upped with the field medics’ corps _she_ was going to become a joke again – was something much worse.

To be a field medic under Sandaime was to be a glorified band-aid dispenser and stretcher carrier, someone viewed incapable of providing competent on the spot care. Apparently, they weren’t even expected to observe Tsunade-shisho’s four laws. Her job would be to fight – if she could, if she wouldn’t hold anyone back with her incompetence – long enough to rush her patients back to the village so that the _real_ medic nin could care for them properly.

Fuck that. She was probably a better medic nin than all of the rest of them _combined_. She was Senju Tsunade’s apprentice and her heir. Even Kakashi-sensei had thought that she might outstrip her master someday.

 _The key words there being **was** and **had thought** ,_ Sakura thought grimly.

She wasn’t Senju Tsunade’s apprentice or heir now.

No one thought that she could outstrip a career genin, never mind the Slug Sanin.

And jokes or not, field medics still had access to the medical library.

If she was going to perform highly inadvisable brain surgery on herself – an action flying directly in the face of good sense, any discernible sense of self-preservation, and all the applicable medical canons – then she needed access to that library.

Mind made up, Sakura tossed all of the other information packets in the little pink wastepaper basket to one side of her desk. Grimly, she scrawled her name across the top of the application for the position of field medic.

Sakura was the absolute best field medic that the Village Hidden in the Leaves had produced since Senju Tsunade had fled it. She had made them acknowledge her as such once. How hard could it be to do it again?

Hellish – but as she filled out her forms, Sakura pretended not to know that.

 

 

 

When Sakura left home the next morning, it was with a bounce in her step, her completed application clutched in her hot little hand, and the remnants of her birthday money safely tucked between the outer side and inner lining of her little lunch box. As Sakura remembered things, theft was a real problem at the ninja academy. Money in pockets was like asking to fend off a legion of burgeoning pickpockets, but no one would question her devotion to guarding her lunch, not with an Akimichi as both a friend and a classmate.

Akimichi took food very seriously.

Sakura dropped her application off at the hospital on her way to school, vowing the moment that it left her hand to come back and check on her status in the program every day if that was what it took to get access to the medical library and all its wonderfully useful books and scrolls on compulsion techniques.

From there, Sakura picked up the pace, jogging to the academy and arriving just in time to plop into her seat a heartbeat before Iruka-sensei strode into the room. By habit, she claimed the empty seat next to Ino, who slid a look sideways at her but otherwise said nothing. It was surprising how quickly the little things were coming back to her, when the bigger things – running, throwing, kicking Kiba in the head – were still eluding her. Damn it.

Classes were surprisingly boring. Sakura had remembered her teachers as being much better speakers. Now, all she noticed were the minor inaccuracies and the way that they glossed over the most interesting parts of their subject matter. It was probably too complicated for academy students, but _Sakura_ would have been interested in a lecture comparing Leaf’s modern sealing techniques to those sealing techniques that had survived the fall of the Village Hidden in the Whirlpools and tracing how the former had evolved from the latter. It was a fascinating area of inquiry.

Instead, Sakura got to watch Iruka-sensei seal, unseal, and reseal a kunai into a storage scroll, while he droned on and on and _on_ about how useful and valuable a decent storage scroll was. According to Iruka-sensei, they were an expensive but necessary part of ninja life. He seemed to think that storage scrolls were incredibly difficult to make.

Fun fact: Storage scrolls weren’t really that hard to make. Sakura had made every storage scroll that she had ever owned. All you needed was some good quality paper that absorbed chakra, equally high quality ink, also chakra absorbent, a thorough grounding in basic sealing techniques, and the ability to both generate and manipulate pure yin chakra. Tsunade would have beaten the tar out of Sakura for wasting her money on stupid stuff like pre-made storage scrolls when they could have taken it to the track and blown it on a sure thing.

Allowing her gaze to briefly flick to Sasuke – still there, still alive, still utterly oblivious – Sakura let her thoughts drift while she idly worked her way through a familiar set of chakra exercises, feeling unspeakably grateful that at least her previously legendary chakra control had followed her into this weaker body.

Working with her chakra – inside her body, where no one but a Hyuuga would see what she was doing – Sakura discovered with a dull sense of delight that she definitely had more chakra than she remembered having even at thirteen. Most of it was yin chakra, reflecting her older mind in her younger body, but Sakura was confident that her yang chakra production would soon adjust to balance it out. Conditioning this body would certainly stimulate yang chakra production and speed up the process. If she was very lucky, she might even end up with larger chakra stores than last time, though Sakura wasn’t going to hold her breath.

Given her current chakra levels and using them to project her future chakra levels as well as her future level of fitness, Sakura felt that a layer of very basic body modifications made sometime at the beginning of the next school year wouldn’t hurt her. She could be stronger, faster, and more durable again. Her monstrous strength would only be a second round of body modifications away.

Unfortunately, yin, yang, or mixed with a nature, Sakura couldn’t afford to be seen using any of her chakra yet. At eleven, she hadn’t known a single jutsu – and hadn’t had access to any, either. With nothing else to do with it, Sakura figured that she would simply up the amount of chakra sent to her Ram seal – after she got around to resealing herself that was. Hopefully, her forced inactivity would allow Sakura to bring the Creation Rebirth and Strength of a Hundred Seals to full power sooner than last time – maybe even in time to save her life this time.

 _Crazy Uchiha bastard,_ Sakura thought, scowling. But since there was nothing to be done about it at the present moment, Sakura let her grudge – and her thoughts – slide away from her.

Past Iruka-sensei’s shoulder, Sakura could see one of the academy’s many trees through the classroom’s window. It was enormous and old, but not as big as any of the ones that the Shodai had grown at the village’s founding. Those trees were monstrously large, and they never bloomed, not like the one outside the window.

It was kind of amazing that the Shodai Hokage’s jutsu had outlived him by so much.

 _He must have used senjutsu to grow them,_ Sakura thought idly. It was the only explanation that made any sense.

All ninjutsu techniques, save those that fell under the category of medical ninjutsu, were made up of some combination of yin and yang chakra and an elemental nature. Yin chakra gave shape to a technique, yang chakra gave it strength, and the element was the medium through which they were expressed.

A greater yin to less yang chakra ratio produced things like genjutsu, the Yamanaka clan’s Mind-Body Switch techniques, and the Nara clan’s Shadow techniques.

Yang chakra was what allowed ninja to instinctively fortify their bodies, granting themselves greater strength, speed, and durability. It was an integral part of the body modifications that she and Tsunade shared – had shared.

Senjutsu, however, was different. It was the gathering and manipulation of the natural energy that all living things produced by the simple act of, well, continuing to be alive. Everything – people, animals, plants – all produced a small field of it around themselves. That natural, living energy was the difference between Shodai’s trees and Kakashi-sensei’s water dragon, and the reason that the former had outlived their creator, while the latter collapsed the moment that Kakashi-sensei’s chakra flow faltered.

Tsunade had taught Sakura a bit about gathering and manipulating senjutsu in the course of her studies at the hospital. Sakura had collected and manipulated natural energy – in the most rudimentary fashion possible, and certainly without achieving anything remotely comparable to the Slug Sage’s level of skill – while creating and producing her Medical Pills.

The day that their clinical trials had been declared a success and her Medical Pills had been added to every medic nin’s first aid kit had been one of Sakura’s proudest achievements. It had secured the future of the Haruno clan – _her_ clan, the one that she was going to found someday – as a clan of medic nin in Konohagakure. As long as her descendents could produce those pills for the village, they would have a place in the shinobi world.

Now, she had to carve that place out for herself all over again.

Another person might have been crushed by her losses.

Sakura chose to think of it as an opportunity to overcome and do better this time… somehow, despite the fact that things had worked out pretty well for her the first time.

Sakura tried really, really hard not to think how well things had been working out for her – despite Sasuke losing his body, before Itachi set off Naruto and stole her life. When she did, it was sometimes difficult to remember that being eleven again was a wonderful opportunity rather than karma punching her in the face via the hand of a suicidal maniac. She probably deserved some sort of hellish karmic punishment for every opportunity that she had ever squandered – so her entire life up until age thirteen, basically – but this seemed a little steep.

Focusing on the here and now seemed like her best option.

Not that focusing seemed to be helping her smaller, weaker, stupider body hit the stationary target. Sakura couldn’t believe that there had ever been a time when tossing a kunai down the length of the academy’s kunai range had been difficult for her, but it was impossible to argue with the ache in her shoulders.

When her blunted practice kunai landed several feet short of the target _yet again,_ Sakura grimly reminded herself that this was yet another opportunity to overcome her deficiencies.

It didn’t help.

 _Damn it!_ Sakura thought, scowling as she sloped back to her place in line. Mortification churned in her gut, acidic. _I’m the only real chunin here. I’m better than this! I should be our year’s number one rookie!_

She hadn’t been the first time around, of course, but then Sakura hadn’t been a displaced chunin in an academy student’s body back then either. It had been a simpler time.

Becoming her year’s number one rookie – an honor that should have rightfully belonged to Ino, though common wisdom had mistaken Sasuke for their year’s number one – was a stupid, petty goal, but it was better than nothing. She still had her pride – and she needed _something_ to strive for, Tsunade had beaten the habit of it into her.

But first, she needed to learn how to make this body move the way that she wanted it to, when she wanted it to, and how she wanted it to move – preferably without humiliating herself any more in the process. That last, though, might have just been wishful thinking on her part. Biting back a sigh, Sakura watched Sasuke make his throws.

 _Pretty good,_ Sakura decided grudgingly. But then, lack of skill had never been Sasuke’s problem.

It was a long, frustrating afternoon.

After school, Sakura went first to the hospital – her paperwork hadn’t been processed yet – then to her favorite stationer’s shop, the sidewalks under her feet dappled with shade by the trees lining them. Most of the trees that lined Konohagakure streets were the smaller ones that had come up long after the Shodai had died. But here and there among them towered the ones that the Shodai had grown at the village’s founding, as big and leafy and bare of flowers as all the rest of their kind.

Standing on the inner edge of the Uzushio district, Sakura’s favorite stationer’s shop was only about ten feet wide and maybe about a hundred feet deep, although half of that had gone to a back storeroom. Neatly tucked between a much larger armorer’s shop and an equally tiny place that sold painting supplies, it was easy to miss. Sakura hadn’t even noticed that the shop until she was eleven. Like so many things, it had disappeared in the wake of the Sand-Sound Invasion. If Sakura remembered rightly, the painting place had taken over its space. Sai had often called on her in the name of _teamwork_ and _friendship_ and their _bond as comrades_ to lug home Sai’s canvases from the art place for him.

Thinking about Sai – about where he must be and what he was likely doing – made Sakura’s heart ache for her teammate. Shoving those thoughts away, Sakura pushed her way into the shop, a trio of jingling bells hanging overhead betraying her arrival.

Inside the shop, Sakura asked the clerk behind the counter as cutely as she knew how for their third largest paper scroll, three bottles of chakra infusible ink – one black, one blue, and one red – and the smallest, finest brush in the shop. That last, the brush, had to be fetched from the back stock room, its long tan box lid dusty with waiting – for someone like her, Sakura imagined. Not many people had a use for such a thin brush with such fine hairs.

The clerk, a retired shinobi with a slightly misaligned face and a limp, eyed Sakura speculatively as he rang up her purchases.

“Trying your hand at sealing?” he guessed, while Sakura carefully arranged her younger self’s life savings on the counter. It was all the money that she would have spent on pretty dresses, cute haircuts, and nail polish the first time around.

Now, Sakura caught her breath and held it, making her face blush. Widening her eyes, she tried her hardest to look every one of her eleven years.

“Yes!” she chirped brightly. “Iruka-sensei taught us all about storage scrolls today! Making one didn’t look that hard. But I thought it might be, er, cheaper to buy a big scroll and then cut it into practice squares.”

The shinobi smiled.

The paper that Sakura was buying wasn’t chakra infusible – a requirement for sealing scrolls – but he didn’t correct her obvious mistake, saying instead, “It’s good, steady work if you’ve got the knack for it,” and quoted a price that was fifty brass coins more than Sakura had. At her expression, he chuckled and made up the difference.

“Thank you,” said Sakura, her gratitude heartfelt. On impulse, she added, “Someday, I’ll make a storage scroll for you. A good one!”

And the clerk smiled again. It wasn’t pretty, but it was very kind, so Sakura beamed back at him.

At home, Sakura did a couple of hours of conditioning – most of it focused on running without falling on her face – showered, and ate dinner with her parents. That last, something that Sakura hadn’t been able to do since she was thirteen, was something that she had been enjoying since she woke up eleven. Like the district, she had missed them more than she had realized.

After dinner, Sakura retired to her room, claiming homework. Resealing herself was a _kind_ of homework.

It was only when she got up to her room that Sakura realized that she had nowhere to do her sealing. Her desk was too small, and her lab no longer her own. Or was it not yet her own?

Sakura shook her head.

Time travel was complicated. Better to stick to the matters at hand.

 _I’m going to have to do some rearranging,_ decided Sakura, while eyeing her bedroom critically.

Moving furniture – even small pieces of furniture – was a lot more work without her monstrous strength to carry her – or rather it.

When Sakura was fourteen, Tsunade had taught Sakura the Uzumaki clan’s Yin Seal as well as her own Creation Rebirth Seal. To those seals, Sakura had eventually added her own mastery seal – the Strength of One Hundred Seal. None of the seals were dependent on the others, though by layering them, Sakura had to fill all three to capacity with her chakra before she could use any of them, either independently or in concert. In this, at least, her confinement to the academy would be an asset to her rather than just an annoyance.

Getting out a colored pencil and a ruler, Sakura began to sketch out the lines of her first seal – the Yin Seal – in bold red lines. Over it, she planned to sketch out both the Creation Rebirth Seal and the Strength of One Hundred seals in differently colored pencils before she inked in any of the seals. They were all complicated seals with a great many precisely placed lines and angles, and she couldn’t afford to mess up any of them. Literally, could not afford it. She hadn’t been able to afford the supplies that she currently had. There would be no replacing anything if she screwed up.

It took hours to get the first seal penciled in, and when she did, a tap on her bedroom door nearly made her smudge the lines.

“What?” Sakura snapped, angry at the interruption.

“Bedtime!” trilled her mother’s voice, muffled by the wood of the door.

“I’m busy!”

“Bedtime,” repeated her mother more firmly. “You can work on your school project tomorrow, honey.”

Graduation was the age of majority in the ninja world. Twelve only a year away, but at that moment it felt very far off.

“Yes, mama,” gritted Sakura, and though she was loathe to do it, she carefully cleared away her sealing equipment. She wished that she could set security jutsu on her desk without drawing attention to it or herself.

Instead, Sakura tucked her things beneath her bed. If anyone tried to get at her secret, she’d wake up. In her current body, she might not be able to do anything about it, but at least she’d know what had happened. Under the current circumstances, it was the best that she could do.

Sakura really hated being eleven again.

 

 

 

It wasn’t just her mother or her bedtime holding her back, Sakura discovered when she finally went to ink her seals.

To work, each line of each seal had to be infused with the same amount of chakra as every other line in that seal. Every wisp of chakra had to be a perfectly balanced mix of yin, yang, and natural chakra, the latter carefully kept devoid of any elemental nature. And each seal had to be inked in its entirety before she could move onto the next. None of the lines, angles, chakra, or ink belonging to any given seal could bleed into the others, save for the places where she had done it intentionally to link the seals together, allowing Sakura to draw the chakra from one when she was using the others.

Inking those seals was hard work, requiring perfect concentration… and a lot more chakra than Sakura’s small body currently possessed. It was going to be several days before Sakura could fully reseal herself.

But she was also five, nearly six, years in her past. Sakura had nothing _but_ time. However long it took, she would eventually manage it.

Sakura was the name of a tree as well as a flower, and she was determined that her second bloom was going to be even better than her first.

Count on it.

 

 

 

Her fourth morning in the past, Sakura went slightly crazy.

But only slightly; it wasn’t like she killed anyone.

When she came back to herself, Sakura had a chunk of pink hair clutched in one hand and a blunted practice kunai in the other. In the mirror, her eyes were wide – too wide – and only half of her hair was still shoulder length. The other half was barely past her ears, its shorn ends uneven and ragged.

Sakura _could_ have used medical jutsu to re-grow the lost inches in a heartbeat. Instead, she dropped the handful of hair in the sink with all the other handfuls of hair that had been carelessly tossed there and grabbed another hank of her pink hair. With quick, steady hands, Sakura hacked off the rest of her hair.

The haircut wasn’t great. In fact, it actually looked worse than that time that she cut her hair in the Forest of Death. And it didn’t do anything to make Sakura look more like herself, not when the body that housed her mind was in was so tiny and weak and helpless, not when the face was all wrong, even if the eyes were right. But it was a start.

And it made her happier.

One glimpse of her impromptu haircut was enough to make her mother cry.

Twice, she offered to take Sakura to the hair salon before school, her voice rising with each of Sakura’s refusals.

“Mama, I can’t be late to school.” Well, she could, but it wouldn’t do much to help her blend in with her classmates.

“At least let me neaten it up for you,” said her mother desperately. “And maybe – maybe some hair products will hide –”

“No,” said Sakura sharply. If she was going to hide what she had done, she would have left her hair alone. Or at least she would have re-grown it before she left the bathroom. She _wanted_ to look different – and feel more like herself. More gently, Sakura added, “I can’t be late. Iruka-sensei yells at latecomers and makes them stand in the hallway. It’s embarrassing.”

Sakura left, while her mother was still offering to write her a note.

She risked jogging through the district, nearly tripping over the nearest curb or cat every time that she dared to wave at anyone she knew or who knew her. This morning, she tripped every few minutes instead of every other step like before.

Progress!

Her body was still slow, and it still easily tired, but her hair was short, it was a nice day, and the Uzushio Quarter was bright with life again. All in all, it seemed like it might be a good day.

When Sakura arrived at school, Ino looked at her twice, but wisely said nothing.

 

 

 

 _Earth, water, senjutsu, yin chakra and yang,_ thought Sakura during morning classes, her thoughts sing-songing, _that’s what Shodai’s trees are made of._

She was ignoring a lecture on – shinobi ranks, Sakura discovered – in favor of (working her chakra and) further contemplation of the tree outside the window. It was a very nice tree; sturdy and good for climbing. The Shodai’s trees were better, though.

Sakura wondered if the Shodaime Hokage had deliberately done that, mixing his elements together to make the biggest, best, and most sturdy tree that he could or if it had just happened that way, his body working on instinct.

Yamato, she knew, had always had to think about it – clapping his hands together to mix his earth release with his water release to produce wood jutsu. But Yamato had also begun life as a horrifying medical experiment somehow gone unexpectedly right, so who knew if his deliberation was the same as the Shodaime Hokage’s.

Most shinobi, Sakura knew, instinctively mixed their yin and yang chakra together. They learned the correct mix for their techniques via trial and error, and then practiced hitting that balance until they didn’t have to think about it anymore. She had never done it that way, though. Her chakra control had always been good, which in turn had enabled her to understand on an almost instinctual level how much of her limited supply of chakra to pour into any given technique. It was how she had accomplished tree walking on her first attempt – and later mastered water walking after a single morning’s practice.

Mastering medical jutsu had meant learning how to deliberately separate and then blend back together various amounts of yin and yang chakra to achieve her desired result. The ability to do deliberately what others did instinctively was one of the skills that separated a master medical ninja from a mere journeyman medic. Tsunade’s reasons for her insistence on this standard of excellence were esoteric at best – and mostly boiled down to, _because I say so_ – but it was impossible to argue with the results. Konohagakure’s master medical ninja were the finest medic nins in the world.

Bored, Sakura decided to work from the assumption that Shodai, like Yamato, had used an element of deliberation when mixing his energies and chakra natures to make trees. She began to sketch out potential methods of mixing yin chakra, yang chakra, senjutsu, and his two chakra natures to grow a tree out of nothing in lieu of taking notes on – shinobi ranks; they were still discussing shinobi ranks. How much was there to say on that, anyway?

Sakura only stopped sketching out her theories when Ino elbowed her in the side, and frowning, Sakura looked up from a tricky bit of theorizing. Apparently, they were going to have a guest speaker today in lieu of weapons practice.

“Ota Ichiro is from the Talon Division,” said Bekko-sensei. “Please give him a warm welcome – and your full attention.”

That last was said with a pointed look in Sakura’s direction, one that she pretended not to notice.

The speaker from the Talon Division, at least, was interesting to Sakura. At the very beginning, back when she was not yet trusted to work on human patients, Sakura had practiced her skills on the village’s birds. Nothing in her life had prepared her for the pride – the sense of accomplishment – that had come from seeing her newly healed patients take flight. She still remembered the joy that had tripped through her chest the first time that it had happened.

Ota Ichiro was the bright spot in her morning. The rest of it was nearly too dull to be borne.

 

 

 

At lunch, Ino asked what was up with Sakura’s hair.

“Nothing,” snapped Sakura defensively. Ino blinked at her sudden hostility – hurt flittering across her child’s face – and Sakura sighed. They weren’t best rivals as well as best friends yet. “It was time for a change?” Sakura offered more gently, and ruffled a hand through her shorn locks.

“I could even it up for you,” Ino offered warily, and Sakura smiled, feeling suddenly and unaccountably happy at the inadvertent parallel.

“Yes, please,” she said meekly. Her mother had offered earlier – and nearly cried at the idea of Sakura going outside looking like that – but it hadn’t been the same, and she hadn’t had time anyway, not if she was going to be on time for school.

So Ino cut Sakura’s hair, Choji finished Sakura’s lunch, and Shikamaru watched them all with his dark eyes. For all that he was the laziest person that she had ever known, Shikamaru was also one of the most curious. New things held his attention.

Watching him watch her, Sakura vowed to be as boring as possible for the foreseeable future.

  



	3. Chapter 3

As a child, Sakura had never really thought about it, but the Uzushio Quarter was filled with seals. Truthfully, she hadn’t even noticed, not even after she had begun spending more time in the village proper – at the academy, at Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji’s houses, or at the ninja shops. She hadn’t even noticed when she had begun taking missions on Team Seven. Sakura hadn’t realized how much she knew about seals until she began studying medical sealing under her master. And she hadn’t realized the wealth of seals used every day in the Uzushio Quarter until she saw her childhood home with her chuunin’s eyes.

There were the seals in her bedroom of course – one on the headboard to give her good dreams, another on the wall to act as a nightlight, others on the window to keep intruders out – as well as all the other rooms of her parents’ house. Seals were sewn along inner hems of clothes, hidden inside toys, and etched down the spines of kitchen knives. They circled lintels, stretched across the mantel, and hid among the bright tiles in the bathroom.

Every neighborhood in the Uzushio District had its own green space, one which was never used for ninja training, though there _were_ a couple of ninja training grounds scattered throughout the district. In those green spaces, families relaxed on blankets sewn with seals, and children splashed in water features that usually had a seal or two hidden under their gravel.

The Uzushio Quarter’s annual celebration was coming up in a few months, and already thick prayer ropes had begun to appear around the Shodaime’s massive trees. Each rope was adorned with dozens of colorful paper streamers, each inscribed with a wish and protected from the elements by a line of seals marked down their backs. There were so many of the Shodai’s trees – and consequently so many streamers – that jogging through the Uzushio Quarter became like running through a rustling rainbow.

Seals were scratched into the bottoms of the wooden crates from which fresh produce was sold, they were twisted into the backs of welcome mats, and they even adorned the insides of old man Yamaguchi’s fluttering wind chimes.

They were _everywhere._

In the Uzushio District, that which was valued was sealed.

Given her district’s love of seals and sealing, Sakura was surprised that Uzumaki Naruto wasn’t more popular there. She wondered why. And then, since she looked like a child, she simply asked someone.

“There’s a boy at school – Uzumaki Naruto. Why doesn’t he ever come to the district’s annual celebration?” asked Sakura one night over dinner. She watched with amusement as her parents both froze at her former teammate’s name. Pressing her momentary advantage – as any good ninja would – she added, “He’s _Uzumaki._ You probably can’t get more Uzushio than being an Uzumaki.”

Well, maybe a red-headed Uzumaki. And Sakura seemed to remember something about the clan having a bloodline limit – or maybe two of them? As far as she knew, Naruto didn’t even have one.

Either way, the Uzumaki clan had been one of the founding clans of Uzushiogakure. Their sealing masters were _legendary._ It seemed odd – and a shame – that the only Uzumaki in Konohagakure wasn’t particularly welcome in the Uzushio Quarter.

“There is more to being Uzushio than just having the right sort of name,” said Sakura’s mother quickly. “He doesn’t share our culture.”

At nearly the same time, Sakura’s father said, “And he doesn’t have the seal.”

“The seal?” asked Sakura, ostensibly willing to be diverted, even though she knew very well what it was. Her parents had had a very short, extremely uncomfortable conversation with Ino’s father when he had offered to fix her brain after her first try at the Chunin Exams and then a much longer, more frank conversation with Sakura after he had left, because her brain wasn’t broken. It was just sealed.

In essence, the seal was Inner Sakura.

A remnant of Uzushiogakure’s information security system, the Four Pillars of Truth Seal had protected the minds and memories Uzushiogakure’s citizens using the subject’s most essential nature as their greatest mental defense. Thirty odd years after the fall of the village Hidden in the Whirlpools and the scattering of its people, those who escaped the destruction of Uzushiogakure still voluntarily inscribed the Four Pillars of Truth Seal next to their children’s hearts.

The daughter of two Uzushiogakure refugees, Sakura had been born in Konohagakure. She had been raised in the Uzushio Quarter, indoctrinated with her parents’ traditions, and sealed at the appropriate age. She was as Uzushio as anyone else in her generation.

Despite being born to an Uzumaki, Naruto rarely if ever set foot in the Uzushio Quarter, he didn’t know any of the traditions, and he hadn’t received the Four Pillars of Truth Seal. Naruto, who should have been as Uzushio as she was, wasn’t considered Uzushio at all.

Neither of Sakura’s parents were sealing masters – they hadn’t even made genin – so they didn’t know much about the elements of the seal itself, but they knew a lot about what it was and what it was supposed to do.

“So you didn’t seal me?” asked Sakura, because she had asked that same question the first time around.

“No, we took you to one of the district’s sealing masters,” said Sakura’s mother.

“Why didn’t anyone take Naruto to one of the district’s sealing masters?” asked Sakura. “His mother should have, right? She was an _Uzumaki!_ Maybe she could have even sealed him herself. But he’s an orphan so… maybe she died before she could give him the seal too.”

Sakura’s parents exchanged an uneasy look.

“Maybe,” said Sakura’s father uncomfortably.

“Then it’s not his fault – or hers – that he doesn’t have it,” said Sakura, and she was surprised by how fiercely she meant it. “His mother probably wanted him to have it too. Why didn’t anyone else have him sealed for her sake?”

The look her parents exchanged then was downright panicky.

“The Leaf wanted him for himself,” said Sakura’s mother at last. “Leaf nin aren’t sealed with the Four Pillars of Truth.”

Sakura frowned. “Really? They don’t seem to like him very much. And they don’t take very good care of him.”

Her parents paled.

_“Never_ say that again!” hissed her mother. Her hand darted across the table, and Sakura allowed her mother’s long fingers to close around her arm. She gave Sakura’s wrist a sharp little shake. “Do you hear me, Sakura? You _cannot_ say things like that – not even here.”

“Mama…”

_“Listen_ to your mother,” said her father sternly. He was never stern. Sakura’s father could rarely manage to be entirely serious. “Think before you speak.”

Sakura’s mother gave her arm another little shake, pulling Sakura’s attention back to herself. “You don’t have to say every thought that comes into your head, Sakura.”

“I understand,” said Sakura, and smiled. Her parents relaxed. “When can I learn the Four Pillars of Truth Seal?” asked Sakura and watched as her parents’ faces lit up.

“You’re thinking of going into sealing then?” asked her mother brightly.

When she was eleven, Sakura would have shrugged her shoulders and looked away. She might even have blushed when she said, “Maybe? I’m good at it. And it interests me.”

Now, Sakura said confidently, “I’m going to become a Sealing Master… among other things.”

With the right seals, Sakura was certain that she could close the gap between herself and her teammates. With the right seal, she could seal away even Itachi’s Susano-o, even if it meant sealing away Itachi’s eyes. Then they’d see how well Uchiha Itachi fought without his bloodline limit.

Her parents looked _delighted._ And just like that, they were thoroughly distracted from her interest in Uzumaki Naruto. And for a few pleasant hours, so was Sakura.

 

 

 

Sakura mastered the art of running without tripping over her other ankle just in time for conditioning with Mizuki-sensei. Unsurprisingly, only she was impressed by that accomplishment.

Day one of conditioning was hellishly hot. When Sakura went to bed that night, she was lightly sunburned and everything ached. It was a good start.

Day two was overcast. Within an hour of starting, Sakura felt a raindrop land high on one of her cheeks.

“Mizuki-sensei!” complained a girl that Sakura had lost track of after the academy. “We’re getting _wet!”_

“Run faster! If you can still talk, you aren’t working hard enough!” hollered Mizuki-sensei from his place beneath a large, black umbrella. “Do you think that you won’t ever get stuck in the rain while running missions for the village?”

_She_ wouldn’t, Sakura knew.

That girl – her name currently escaped Sakura – hadn’t grown up to be a kunoichi. Sakura thought that she had heard somewhere that she had been killed in the Sand-Sound invasion or maybe ended up apprenticing as a chef at Yashimura’s, that high priced sushi restaurant in downtown Konohagakure, but she wasn’t certain.

The only thing that Sakura could say for certain was that the girl was a whiner. She kept complaining to the gaggle of girls that she was jogging with, her nasally voice carrying.

Past the girls, Mizuki-sensei’s face darkened. When he finally threw a kunai at her, only that girl and her friends were surprised.

Sakura wondered if she and Ino had been that annoying the first time around. She thought not, just judging by the face that Ino made as she lapped them. Ino would have never have kept her around if she was _that_ annoying.

Mizuki-sensei made them keep running throughout the ensuing deluge.

 

 

 

“Hey Sakura,” said Ino later, her voice low so that it didn’t carry under the splash of warm water against tile and the collective tittering of sixty preteen girls as they showered. “You’ve been… different… lately.”

Sakura slanted a sideways look toward Ino, meaning to gauge the intent behind her words. Instead, she was distracted by a pang in her chest sweet and sharp enough to slice all the way through her.

It had been a long time since Sakura had last caught Ino looking at her like that – young and unguarded and achingly earnest. She wasn’t precisely a wide-eyed innocent – the Shinobi Academy began chipping away at that early on, and the clans earlier still – but she was as close to it as any shinobi child got. At eleven, Ino was still sweet in a way that Sakura’s friend at sixteen hadn’t been in a long time.

_This,_ Sakura decided, _is Itachi’s real gift to me – inadvertent, ill-advised, and crazy as it was._

She had the chance to enjoy Ino’s relative innocence again, a period of time in any shinobi’s life that was as brief and brilliant as a butterfly’s flight.

_And this time,_ Sakura vowed, _things won’t get ugly between us even when they become complicated._

And they _would_ become complicated. Ino wasn’t going to take Sakura’s usurpation of her place as their year’s number one rookie lying down. She was going to fight Sakura tooth and nail for it.

Just thinking about it sent warm nostalgia stealing through Sakura.

“Sakura?” Ino pressed, drawing Sakura’s attention back to the matter at hand. Her friend was frowning at her. “Is everything okay? You feel…”

Ino’s mouth briefly twisted down, and Sakura knew what she meant. That feeling was hard to quantify – happy but sad, sweet yet sour, brilliant and painful, all at once. If there was a word for it, Sakura didn’t know it either. It was an emotion that she hadn’t known at eleven.

“I’m fine,” Sakura promised. Bringing her hands to her hair, Sakura briefly scrubbed at the shampoo in it then twirled, turning her back to the spray of warm water. Her head tipped back, Sakura scanned the room from beneath her lowered lashes, gauging the interest of their classmates in their conversation.

The locker room was the best place to tell secrets – it was by nature noisy enough to cover a conversation and steamy enough to obscure lip movements – but by the same token, it was also the best place to pick them up too. No one seemed overly interested in them, however, though it was impossible to tell what a Hyuuga was observing at any given moment.

Sakura liked Hinata well enough, but the Hyuuga heiress had been no particular friend of hers at the academy. And good habits were good habits – especially when there were other Hyuuga lurking about.

Turning back around, Sakura dropped her head, her chin coming to rest against her (mournfully flat) chest. Her hands scrubbed at the shampoo at the back of her neck and the slick residue it left across her shoulders, making Sakura’s deliberate action to hide her mouth against the glow of her chakra system look more natural.

Next to her, Ino’s eyes sharpened, though her expression didn’t so much as twitch.

“I’ve applied to the field medic’s program,” Sakura murmured, and Ino’s eyes widened.

“Sakura!” Ino squeaked, her face bright with excitement. By habit, her voice didn’t carry far. “I’m so happy for you!”

Sakura smiled, genuinely pleased by her friend’s response.

“Thanks!” Choosing her words carefully – Ino had always felt the change in her mindset when she lied – Sakura said, “Sensei always said that my chakra control was very good, and it’s a good way to hone that into a useful skill. It’s only been a few days since I turned my application in, so I don’t know what they think of it yet.”

Not much, Sakura suspected. But that was okay. One way or another, she was going to get in.

Ino frowned, her fine eyebrows briefly flicking together.

“It might be easier next year,” her friend cautiously opined. “After we’ve graduated.”

“Probably,” Sakura agreed. “But I wanted to get started as soon as possible. I want to get my medic training out of the way so I can move onto other things.”

Ino grimaced. “You always did study too much, Sakura.”

“Probably,” agreed Sakura, because as smart as she was, she really had been very silly at eleven. Sakura hadn’t really understood what her teachers had been trying to prepare her for until she was thirteen and everything was falling apart around her.

It was only a moment later, when surprise and then wariness flickered across Ino’s childish face that Sakura realized that she should have been flustered and defensive. She hadn’t answered correctly!

_Stupid, stupid mistake! But I can’t get caught now,_ Sakura thought, her stomach twisting. Itachi’s wild panic was rising in her like a thick fog over a river of her thoughts, making them choppy and disorganized. Were his thoughts always like this? Were his feelings always so strong? How did Itachi live like this? _If Ino’s father drags me off to T &I, who will protect Sasuke? I have to protect Sasuke!_

“Th-There’s another thing,” said Sakura, as casually as she could manage, which wasn’t very; not with Itachi’s desperation pounding at the back of her head like a war drum, not with her heart beating in time to it. Damn Uchiha. “I’ll tell it some other time.”

Curiosity lit Ino’s childish features, but a deliberate glance at the clock, barely visible through the steam, forestalled her questions, giving Sakura time to drum up another secret to confess to Ino. The truth was out, for obvious reasons.

_I’ll give her something though,_ Sakura thought as she pumped her hand against the dispenser, dropping blobs of cheap industrial grade conditioner into her palm. _Something good._

After all, there was no shortage of secrets and gossip to be had and shared in a ninja village. And if Sakura couldn’t come up with a secret of her own to share, she could certainly find someone else’s.

 

 

 

It was three long, uncomfortable days before the academy’s instructors got around to critiquing Sakura.

During their first five years at the academy, ninja studies were confined to six main areas of study: physical conditioning, kunai and shuriken practice, taijutsu, tactics and strategy, trap making, and kunoichi classes. The three ninjutsu that academy students learned as well as the fire starting jutsu and all of their genjutsu training – which, truthfully, wasn’t much – were taught in a student’s final year at the academy.

Of the six areas, Sakura had only truly excelled at tactics and strategy and trap making while she was in the academy. Kunoichi and weapons classes had been hit or miss for her at eleven, while physical conditioning had been mostly miss. And Sakura knew for a fact that her younger self had been _terrible_ at the Leaf’s taijutsu techniques.

Being love rivals with Ino during their last year at the academy had vastly improved Sakura’s skill with kunai and shuriken, just as being on Team Seven had improved her physical conditioning, but Sakura hadn’t bloomed as a shinobi until she had become Tsunade’s second apprentice. Tsunade had improved nearly every facet of her, both as a ninja and as a person.

But at eleven, Sakura had been an absolutely dismal shinobi candidate, and her instructors had had no way of knowing that she would improve – or even that she would prove to be a genjutsu type next year. Sakura couldn’t _believe_ that Iruka-sensei would dare to smile at her and say, “You’re doing fine, Sakura! Keep up the good work!”

When she was really eleven, Sakura would have been happy with that evaluation. He had said that she was doing _fine!_ They hadn’t scolded her! She would have thanked them then and left.

Now, Sakura frowned and wondered how he could possibly smile at her like that and tell her to keep it up. As far as they knew, her foundations weren’t _fine._ She was only excelling relative to her peers in two areas – and neither was as immediately practical as being able to dodge or deflect the thrust of a kunai. The first time around, Sakura had been lucky to live long enough to meet Tsunade of the Sanin, never mind apprenticing under her.

At least Suzume-sensei hadn’t smiled or nodded.

Narrowing her eyes, Sakura asked cautiously, “How would you suggest that I improve?”

Suzume-sensei’s eyebrow twitched, and Iruka-sensei actually blinked, before the kunoichi said crisply, “More physical conditioning, less theoretical work.”

Sakura stared at her teachers.

“That’s… all?” she asked as delicately as she could manage.

Suzume-sensei inclined her head.

Sakura waited a beat – she could think of lots of ways that her younger self had needed to improve – but when no more advice proved to be forthcoming from either instructor, Sakura smiled sweetly and said, “Thank you, Suzume-sensei. I _will_ work on my physical conditioning.”

Inside, Sakura was _seething._

All in all, Sakura’s entire counseling session lasted less than five minutes. Sakura couldn’t _believe_ that it had taken them three days to get around to saying that to her. What were they saying to her peers? And which of them were they taking longer with?

Her lackluster performance review cast a pall over the rest of her day. Making excellent use of her ability to multitask, Sakura chose to fume while she staggered laps around the perimeter of the academy’s practice ground.

_I’m not just going to beat Ino,_ Sakura decided. _I’m going to score higher than them too!_

After Mizuki-sensei dismissed them for the day, Sakura went to look up her teachers’ scores in the school library.

As a child, Sakura had never been interested in the academic scores of those who had passed through the ninja academy before her, but she knew that the academy kept a record of them where any student could look at them. She had to ask one of the librarians where the yearbooks were shelved.

“Extra credit project?” guessed the chunin who was helping her. As an academy student, Sakura had done all of those.

“A new goal,” corrected Sakura. “I wanted to see who had the highest score on the exit exam.”

It could have been true.

The chunin hummed and led Sakura to a shelf filled with fat, dusty books, all of which were leaf green with years embossed in gold on their spines. Looking at the years on them, Sakura realized that they only went back about thirty-five years – Sakura’s shisho and her teammates wouldn’t be in them.

“You want this one,” said the librarian, as he fished down one of the books. It was the only book on the shelf without a pair of years stamped onto its spine. “It’s a list of the academy’s top one hundred graduates ranked according to their exam scores.”

“Thank you,” said Sakura.

Under the librarian’s watchful eye, Sakura flipped open the book.

The first face was one that she recognized. His smile was goofy and a bit shy with none of his monument’s sternness.

“Yondaime-sama,” Sakura breathed, her eyes skipping over his scores. They had all been perfect, of course. And he had been ten years old at the time.

_No beating him, I suppose,_ Sakura thought wistfully, as she turned the page.

The face glaring up at her from the second page was _adorable._

And also familiar. And –

“So cute!” squealed Sakura, feeling both shocked and utterly, unspeakably gleeful.

Kakashi-sensei had been the cutest, _angriest_ five year old to ever graduate the academy, Sakura was sure. _And_ he was already wearing his mask.

Sakura didn’t know whether it was his age or his _two_ grey eyes that shocked her more. She had always known that Kakashi-sensei was an elite shinobi, but she had never imagined him with two matching eyes. And she had never before seen him angry.

His scores were only near perfect, the slacker.

And after Hatake Kakashi came… Uchiha Itachi.

Of course, he did.

Sakura scowled down at the sad little boy gazing up at her through dark, limpid eyes. He didn’t _look_ like a deranged mass murderer –

_Was probably what his clan thought as he mass murdered them,_ Sakura thought angrily as she skimmed Uchiha Itachi’s scores. Like Kakashi’s, they were only nearly perfect. In fact, though his individual scores had varied slightly, he had ultimately ended up tying with Kakashi-sensei. His best score had been in ninjutsu – no surprise there, though Sakura _was_ surprised to discover that it was possible to score a better than perfect score on any part of the graduation exam – his worst score had been in taijutsu, and his second worst trap making, things that Sakura carefully tucked away in the recesses of her mind.

Sakura hadn’t been planning to face Itachi in a knockdown, drag out ninjutsu battle – despite the echo of Itachi’s will lingering at the back of her brain, she wasn’t actually crazy – and he had had a long time since his academy days to make up for his deficiencies, of course, but Itachi hadn’t beaten her in a fist fight or caught her in a trap, so perhaps he hadn’t bothered to address those issues with his performance. Sakura wouldn’t count on it, of course, but all knowledge had its value.

To add insult to injury, Sakura saw that he had been only seven when he had graduated.

_Bastard,_ she thought spitefully. She couldn’t even have this over him. The only way that she could beat him would be if she earned a perfect score, tying with Namikaze Minato.

It wasn’t impossible – she was twelve, a chunin, and the apprentice of the Godaime Hokage – but Namikaze Minato had been the _Yondaime Hokage_. That was a lot to live up to.

On the other hand, if she managed this, she would be that much closer to being who she had been again.

_And_ she would get to defeat Uchiha Itachi at something, no matter how small or petty or stupid it was. Academy grades didn’t even _matter_ – not after genin teams were assigned, and sometimes not even then, otherwise it would have been Ino who was Naruto and Sasuke’s teammate instead of Sakura.

That she would be competing with Kakashi-sensei too though… well, that was icing on the cake. Imagining that – imagining how much fun it would be to taunt Kakashi-sensei about coming second to her after they were comrades again – was what did it. Kakashi-sensei had always been fun to tease even though there had always been very little with which to tease him. A higher academy score would be as good as anything else.

Mind made up, Sakura flipped back to Kakashi-sensei’s page. Ironically, genjutsu escape and infiltration techniques had been his weak points.

_Probably because he refused to take off his mask,_ thought Sakura, smiling as she imagined it. Suzume-sensei would have failed him so hard!

Sakura jotted down her former sensei’s scores, but didn’t bother with Yondaime’s – perfection was easy to remember. Then she carefully returned the book to its place on the shelf.

The librarian had left her side by then, but Sakura waved to him as she left.

Sakura walked home slowly, thinking hard.

She thought that she probably had all of her academic areas covered, although she might need to brush up on what each teacher preferred to see in a perfect assignment. And as a chunin, she knew that she had mastered tactics, strategy, trap making, ninjutsu, and genjutsu to academy standards.

But her coordination was shot, her younger body needed to be physically conditioned to within an inch of its life, and she needed to practice throwing with this new body. She also needed to relearn the style of taijutsu taught at the academy and temporarily phase out some of the techniques unique to her Tsunade-shisho’s taijutsu style. As far as the village was concerned, there was absolutely no reason for her to know how to punch a hole through a mountain – and it would be a couple of years until she could make all of the body modifications necessary to support that style of combat anyway.

It was going to be a lot of work, and she only had – Sakura did some quick mental calculations – fourteen weeks and some odd days to do the bulk of it. Using a supply of her Medical Pills would certainly help, but she needed money to buy the ingredients.

The only source of money looming in her future was the field medic’s program at the hospital.

Sakura dropped by the hospital yet again to see if her paperwork had been processed yet.

“I’ve been waiting for you to come by!” said the girl at the front desk brightly. Red-haired and grey-eyed, her name was Emiko, and she was a new acquaintance. “Hold on a second!”

Sakura watched as Emiko searched for something n her messy desk, papers creasing beneath her careless hands.

“Aha!” said Emiko triumphantly as she unearthed a long, white envelope. “I’ve got an envelope for you! I mailed the others, but I knew you’d come by so…” She passed Sakura the envelope.

Sakura ripped the letter open, her movements less careful than she should have been. Even without her usual strength, she nearly ripped the letter in half.

“So?” pressed Emiko, as Sakura’s eyes skimmed the lines of text. “Did you make it in?”

“I’ve been invited to interview with Nohara Reiko,” said Sakura. That, at least, was someone that she knew.

“I think I saw her go into her office a minute ago!” said Emiko, and before Sakura could respond one way or the other, she leaned over to press a button on the intercom.

“Nohara-sensei?” said Emiko, as the intercom crackled to life. “Do you have a minute for an interview?”

There was a brief pause, before a voice said suspiciously, “What kind of interview?”

“For the field medic’s program!” said Emiko. “The girl that I told you about is here, and I thought that as long as she was – and if you had time – now would be as good a time as any to get her interview out of the way.”

“I’ll be right out.”

“Thanks!” chirped Emiko, and released the button. Sitting back in her seat, she smiled up at Sakura. “There you go! It’s better to do it now than later. Seats fill up in those courses.”

“Oh,” said Sakura, surprised. “Thank you.”

“No problem!”

Sakura wasn’t as vain as she had once been, but she still wished that she had time to clean up before her interview. Instead she watched – painfully aware that she was smelly, dirty, and sweat-stained from her earlier conditioning with Mizuki-sensei – as a small, dark-haired woman with a delicate build emerged from the hallway behind Emiko’s desk.

Nohara Reiko looked tired, but amused. Soon, she was joined by another doctor, Tomochika Goichi, and an older medic nin, Shindo Fuyuki. Both doctors had been field medics during the Third Shinobi War before they left active duty in favor of permanent attachment to the hospital, they were all competent, and Shindo Fuyuki had a hot temper.

She liked her interview committee, Sakura decided as the trio moved toward her.

When the trio stopped in front of her, Sakura set her shoulders and smiled up at them. It felt odd that all of them – even tiny Nohara Reiko – were taller than her. It was… discomforting.

“It’s an honor to meet all of you,” said Sakura when the introductions were made. “Thank you for seeing me today.”

_I know these people,_ thought Sakura. _I know their strengths and weaknesses. And I’m the best candidate that they have – or are going to get. I can do this!_

She _had_ to do this.

Determined, Sakura stormed after them into the interview room.

 

 

 

All in all, her interview didn’t go badly.

Sakura thought that she answered their questions well enough, but she could see in their faces that they weren’t taking her _seriously._ That was okay. Sakura already had her backup plan in place.

When Nohara-sensei started to suggest that Sakura try again after she had at least a year as a genin under her belt, Sakura tipped her head to the side and smiled, saying, “Are you worried that I don’t have the necessary chakra control yet? My teacher once said that my chakra control is already better than that of many jonin ninja. It might even be better than yours.”

It was even true. Kakashi-sensei really had said that about her… when she was really twelve.

Across from her, Shindo Fuyuki’s mouth twisted down and tiny genjutsu flames ignited in his eyes.

“Prove it!” he snapped, leveling an accusatory finger at her, and Sakura let her smile grow into a smirk – one calculated for maximum annoyance.

“Gladly,” she sneered, momentarily forgetting that she was eleven, not sixteen going on seventeen. Satisfaction coiled around her heart like a serpent – or a slug. “Name the challenge.”

It wasn’t _a_ challenge. It was a whole series of chakra exercises challenges that Sakura breezed through with an ease befitting Tsunade’s second apprentice.

“To be fair,” said Sakura as she completed the last one, seeking to smooth away even a fraction of Fuyuki’s growing sullenness, “it’s a talent, not a skill.”

Well, it hadn’t been at the beginning. Tsunade was the one that had taken her natural talent for chakra control and trained it until it was a skill that Sakura could wield as incisively as Shizune wielded her senbon needles.

After that, her place in the program was a cinch. Orientation would begin the weekend after next.

“Haruno,” said Tomochika Goichi at the end of the interview, and Sakura, who was halfway to the door, froze. “You don’t have to answer this but… why do you want to be a field medic? With your chakra control, you could train to become a full medical ninja attached to the hospital.”

_Field medics **are** full medics,_ thought Sakura fiercely. _Or they should be._

“That’s not my dream,” said Sakura, half turning to look at him. She smiled tightly. “But I’ll never be the sort of person that would let my comrades die – not if I can help it – so it makes sense to become a field medic too.”

No one said anything, so Sakura assumed that the interview was over. Raising two fingers in farewell, Sakura left.

Slowly, Sakura jogged home, gasping and wheezing the entire way.

It finally felt like things were beginning to come together. Maybe. All she had to do was protect Sasuke, fix her brain, protect Sasuke, claw her way back up the shinobi ranks, protect Sasuke, kick Itachi’s ass – he totally had it coming; her brain was a _mess_ – and protect Sasuke, because her little brother was _everything._

**_Not_** _my little brother,_ thought Sakura. She _really_ hated Itachi’s stupid compulsion technique.

As she ran, Sakura tried to ignore her body’s complaints by trying to mentally map out the bare bones of her summer training regimen.

Summer was the semester in which clan kids shadowed their parents and focused on learning their clans’ specialties. Academy teachers returned to the field to brush up on their skills, and most of the academy was locked up tight.

As a child, Sakura had found summer a welcome respite from the pressures of the ninja academy. She had tried to keep in shape, but she had spent the bulk of her time haunting the academy’s library.

This summer, Sakura was going to train hard, get in shape, and remake this slow, weak eleven-year-old body of hers into the body of the number one rookie of her year. It was going to become the body with which she crushed her tiny, adorable sensei’s scores.

It was going to be brutal.

_But it’ll be worth it when I beat sensei and Itachi,_ thought Sakura fiercely. Admittedly, she would be pitting the entirety of her sixteen-year-old chunin self against the entirety of her angry, little sensei’s five-year-old self, every ounce of strength in her eleven-year-old body against every ounce of strength in Itachi’s seven-year-old self, but one couldn’t have everything.

One could, however, have a wash, a soak, and a quiet afternoon in which to finish brilliant, paradigm altering medical seals and apply them to one’s own forehead.

The familiar web of the lines and dots briefly burned against Sakura’s face, against her whole body, as they burrowed beneath her skin. They seared their way through her muscles and branded themselves into her bones. It only lasted for a moment – a long, gut-wrenchingly painful moment in time – then it was over, the page that had held her seals now black and Sakura transformed.

For the first time since she had woken up in her childhood bed, Sakura felt like herself; smaller, weaker, diminished, yes, but _herself._

It felt pretty damn good.

 

 

 

On the last day of school, Sakura took Ino to their bench – the one that she had taken Ino to when she returned Ino’s ribbon and declared Ino her love rival. This time, Sakura was wearing their red ribbon when she declared them Best Rivals.

Standing across from Ino, Sakura said, “Next year, I’m coming for you. _I’m_ going to our year’s number one rookie, not you. From here on out, I’m your rival as well as your friend.”

Ino looked stunned.

Her eyes flicked up to Sakura’s hair, where their red ribbon was firmly knotted, then back to Sakura’s face. Ino’s brilliant eyes narrowed.

“We’ll just see about that… _Forehead Girl.”_

Sakura smirked, delighted. “Bring it on… Ino- _pig.”_

Ino’s eyes briefly widened – outraged – then narrowed again. A sharp smile – blunt compared to the ones that she’d give Sakura later, but a good first effort – twisted Ino’s lips. With a flick of her shoulder length hair, Ino turned and stalked away. Over her shoulder, Ino called, “Train harder, Forehead. Next year, I don’t want to be bored by you.”

Sakura laughed.

Ino was hurt – Sakura could tell that much just from the set of Ino’s shoulders – but at least they weren’t feuding over a boy that neither of them wanted as much as each other’s acknowledgement. She’d get over it.

Probably.

After making Sakura thoroughly regret it.

Sakura went home to start training.


	4. Chapter 4

As unlikely as it was, Sakura had planned to spend her entire first day of summer break training relentlessly. She had envisioned herself as making slow but steady progress. The truth was… less inspiring.

Truthfully, she was _distracted._ And it wasn’t until the fifth time that she caught herself casually searching for Sasuke’s hair that she was willing to admit the problem: Sasuke. Specifically, there was no Sasuke for her to visually check on a dozen times a day. Knowing that he was safe somewhere inside the village wasn’t enough. She had to go see.

Cursing Uchiha Itachi, all of his forbearers, and whatever missing nin had failed to kill him in his murky past, Sakura gave up training and went to find Sasuke. She jogged over to the part of town that she vaguely remembered Sasuke’s apartment as being in. Where it was exactly, she didn’t know, but Sakura spent most of the day figuring it out. She also spent most of the day itching, her compulsive need to see Sasuke jittering just beneath her skin.

And the entire time, Itachi’s compulsion tormented Sakura with Itachi’s insane, completely unreasonable fears. After three hours, Sakura found herself half convinced – and entirely panicked, in the most violent, murderous way possible – that someone terrible might have happened to foolish little Sasuke when she wasn’t looking. Which would be terrible! She had to protect him!

Some _one,_ went Itachi’s thoughts, never some _thing._

The difference was not lost on Sakura.

By the time that Sakura next set eyes on Sasuke – alive, safe, whole, look again, still alive, safe, and whole – she had raked pink lines up and down the length of her arms, despite Inner Sakura’s best efforts to protect her from the worst effects of Itachi’s compulsion.

Sitting in the tree outside of his apartment – and watching as Sasuke towel dried his hair – Sakura tried to think what to do. Clearly, she had to keep closer tabs on Sasuke. She didn’t want to know if the echo of Itachi’s will that lingered at the back of her brain could get _even crazier_ or more obsessive.

But keeping closer tabs on Sasuke would interfere with her training. She’d never get anything done if she had to track down Sasuke every couple of hours.

_There’s only one thing to do,_ Sakura decided as she soothed lines of abraded flesh. _I’m going to have to go visit Minako tomorrow._

It would eat into her training time, but it would probably be worth it.

 

 

 

Sakura’s cousin Minako bore about as much relation to Sakura as anyone else in the Uzushio Quarter, save her parents, which was to say that they were related not at all. In the Uzushio Quarter, grandparents by blood, aunts by blood, and uncles by blood were extremely rare in Sakura’s generation, but adopted ones were very common.

Sakura’s Aunt Mai had lived down the street from her father in Uzushiogakure back when there was an Uzushiogakure to live in. When the village had fallen, Aunt Mai had found Sakura’s father in the ruins and taken him by the hand. They had never found their own lost siblings or parents or grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins, but they had had each other even if that hadn’t been nearly enough.

Sakura’s father and her Aunt Mai had eventually left what was left of Hidden in the Whirlpool with a band of orphans nominally cared for by a half-dead Uzushio jonin that one of the other kids had dug out of a pile of rotting corpses. Sakura’s mother had been part of that group too, and Sakura had been raised to call no less than five of its members her aunts and uncles.

Aunt Mai was almost a decade older than Sakura’s father, and Sakura’s cousin Minako was similarly nearly a decade older than Sakura herself. Old and grown up – at least, as Sakura had seen things at twelve – Minako had married and recently pushed a pair of twins into the world.

Looking at her cousin now, Sakura wondered at how _young_ Minako was.

“A babysitting mission? For the shinobi academy?” asked Minako, who was dandling tiny baby Daichi on her knee.

“Yes, essentially,” said Sakura, who was trying her hardest not to drop Eiji. It was harder than it sounded.

“The upper years must be so much more fun than the lower ones!” chirped her cousin, and Sakura shrugged.

“There are some good points, some bad,” she said philosophically, and her cousin laughed. “It’ll be a relief when it’s over.”

Minako suddenly narrowed her eyes at Sakura. “You’re not just saying that to spare my feelings are you? I’m glad that you’re so good at ninja things.”

“No, of course not,” said Sakura quickly. “I’m just… ready to move on.”

There Minako nodded and settled back in her seat, seemingly satisfied.

Immigration to Hidden in the Leaves did not come without its consequences. Immigrants were required to either attend the Shinobi Academy themselves or send a child of their body in their place. Such children couldn’t quit the academy, no matter how bad it got. They had to either be washed out by their teachers or passed into a genin’s contract. As Aunt Mai’s eldest child, Minako had been sent to the Shinobi Academy ate age six, like Sakura herself had later been. Unlike Sakura, though, Minako had washed out at the end of her fourth year. She could channel chakra well enough to stick a handful of leaves to her forehead, but she didn’t know a single ninja technique.

Few people in the Uzushio Quarter did though.

But Minako – like every good Uzushio – knew a few seals.

And just as Sakura hoped, her cousin had a seal to help her keep track of her toddlers. In fact, Minako had a whole battery of homemaking and childrearing seals. Sakura didn’t know if she was ever going to want to have children, but she could see immediately practical uses for seals that let someone keep track of someone else on a map. Minato knew barrier seals to keep children from falling down stairs, as well as seals to act as nightlights, seals to blackout a lit room, and sound dampening seals. She knew some basic locks – nothing as complicated as the seals that protected her home, but more than enough to keep babies out of cabinets – and stasis seals to keep food hoot, cold, or relatively fresh, among other things.

Sakura had seen some of the seals that Minako described around her childhood home, but her parents hadn’t ever gotten around to teaching them to her. Maybe they would have if they had stayed in Konohagakure longer. Or maybe they had been waiting for Sakura to have a house or a baby of her own. Whatever their reasons, Minako had a wealth of seals that Sakura wanted, and she was willing to teach any or all of them to Sakura for the low, low price of her future misery.

Sakura, who could already feel Itachi’s compulsion rising under her skin like a sunburn, blithely promised her cousin seven babysitting nights in exchange for the locator seal and still felt that she had gotten off cheaply, especially when she understood the theory behind the seal.

At least in theory, it was an offshoot of summoning jutsu, except no one was being dragged anywhere. Instead, they were using their blood to locate everyone who shared that blood within a certain radius of the caster, depending on the caster’s strength and skill with the jutsu. In a clan compound, it would have been useless. But in a district like the Uzushio Quarter, where few people were related by actual blood, it was dead useful.

“It probably isn’t what you were hoping for, but it _is_ what you asked for,” said Minako defensively, because as was, she had conned Sakura out of seven babysitting obligations for a seal that was ostensibly worthless to her, but Sakura brushed her words away.

“It’ll take some testing, but I think I can modify this to my purposes,” said Sakura absently, her mind already churning through possibilities.

“You can?” asked Minako, sounding surprised. “Did they teach you that at the academy?”

Sakura blinked at her cousin, surprised. She was tempted to lie to Minako, but at the naked envy and regret in Minako’s expression, Sakura said, “No. In your last two years at the academy, they mostly talk about how difficult sealing is and say it’s best left to a master. I figured that out on my own.” Thinking of her Strength of One Hundred Seal, Sakura smiled and added, “I’m actually pretty good at sealing, you know.”

Minako laughed, her expression clearing. “Of course you are! You’re Uzushio, aren’t you?”

Sakura should probably have made her excuses and left then – it would have been more comfortable for her if she had – but instead she left it to Inner Sakura to stomp Itachi’s rising compulsion down while she visited with a cousin that she hadn’t seen in literal years. They talked, drank tea, and played with Minako’s boys until it was time for the twins to go down for their naps. _Then_ Sakura made her excuses and escaped.

She had to go spy on Sasuke, after all. Sakura needed to make sure that he was okay and protect him from any danger.

But first, she had to find him.

He wasn’t at home so Sakura tried the Uchiha ghetto, finding him on one of the extinct clan’s training grounds. He appeared fine, if slightly singed around the edges. Luckily, there was a lake with a rickety dock nearby.

Over lunch, Sakura watched Sasuke try to teach himself how to blow fire down his ninja wires. Sakura, who had had a hell of a time learning the very basic fire jutsu used to light campfires, wished him luck with that.

After lunch – and after her stomach had finished settling – Sakura went running. She needed to condition and she needed to think. Somehow, one way or another, Sasuke was going to be sealed with some variation on Minako’s child tracking seal. That was a given. But figuring out how to efficiently modify it to suit her purposes was going to be harder. And she was going to need to find someone willing to let her test her variations on them.

Sakura couldn’t wait to get started.

But first, she needed to go check on Sasuke again.

 

 

 

By the time that Sakura’s extended family gathered to celebrate Sakura’s admittance into the field medic’s program – something that her parents were taking much more seriously than Sakura herself was – Sakura had three working variations on the tracking seal to test. She still needed willing test subjects though. It was only a working theory, but Sakura suspected that was what cousins were for.

Sakura’s nuclear family consisted of only her, her mother, and her father and the three of them fit comfortably in the cozy little apartment over their shop. But with all of her relatives in attendance – namely, her three aunts, two uncles, their various spouses, and all of their assorted children and grandchildren – there was absolutely no way that they could eat dinner in their home.

Instead, Sakura’s parents had reserved one of the picnic pavilions in their neighborhood’s park. After helping her parents set up at the pavilion, Sakura swung by her cousin Minako’s house to help carry stuff down to the pavilion for her. If there was one thing that Sakura had learned across Team Seven’s various disastrous babysitting missions, it was that babies did not travel light. Sakura didn’t currently have her monstrous strength – and it would be at least a year or two before she could make the necessary body modifications to regain it, not that she was counting dwn the days or anything, because that would be crazy – but she still knew how to use chakra to reinforce and strengthen her body. The results would be less impressive, but surely they would be good enough to haul baby gear around for her cousin.

When Sakura arrived at Minako’s shop, she ran around the side of the building to press her hand to the back door. A seal briefly glowed blue under her palm and the door’s lock unlatched itself. Pushing the door open, Sakura was greeted by the shrill wails of angry toddlers. Girdling her loins, Sakura ran up the narrow set of stairs to the landing, where Minako was waiting for her with a wailing baby on each hip.

“They’re teething. Sometimes it flares up,” said her cousin by way of explanation, and Sakura lit up.

“Oh, oh, I know this one!” said Sakura excitedly, while taking Daichi from his mother. Building a minor medical jutsu in her forefinger, Sakura rubbed her finger over Daichi’s gums. Under her touch, the baby settled.

“How’d you do that?” asked Minako enviously, as she exchanged Eiji for Daichi.

“It’s a medical jutsu,” said Sakura. “I learned it while working in the hospital’s general walk-in clinic.”

“So useful,” sighed her cousin happily, as Sakura settled Eiji.

Minako’s husband, Norio, appeared at the door to kitchen, a pair of frosty looking teething rings in his hands.

“What happened?”

“Sakura used a ninja technique on them,” said Minako happily.

When Norio squinted at Sakura suspiciously, Sakura said stiffly, “One I learned at the hospital,” and watched as her cousin’s husband relaxed.

Minako, however, scowled at him. “What did you _think_ I meant?”

“How should I know?” said Norio. He raised his hands defensively between them. “Ninja do strange and terrible things to their children.”

“Sakura would never!” gasped Minako. “She’s _my cousin.”_

At the same time, Sakura growled, “I would never!” and she, unlike Minako, also brandished a fist. If the twins hadn’t been looking, Sakura definitely would have hit him for even daring to imply anything like that about her.

Nothing he said after that point was an apology, which meant that Norio spent the entire walk to the park in the doghouse.

Sakura spent the walk carrying an oversized diaper bag and her cousin’s sveche and wondering what would happen when Minako decided that it was time to put the Pillar of Four Truths Seal on their sons. Norio and Minako were both civilians, but he wasn’t Uzushio himself. As far as Sakura knew, Norio’s family didn’t usually seal their children. Hyuuga was the only clan in Konohagakure that did, and the village’s feelings about _that_ were ambivalent at best. Uzushio, by contrast, were usually pretty free with their seals and doubly so when they loved a thing. Sakura was pretty certain that, although Norio didn’t know it, Minako had already put locator seals under her sons’ hair. Judging by his behavior earlier, if Norio ever found out about the seals under the twins’ hair, he would probably be furious that Minako had ever used ninja techniques on their children.

_Norio,_ Sakura thought unhappily, _might have been a mistake on Minako’s part._

At the picnic grounds, Sakura found that her Aunt Mai had already arrived with Minako’s younger siblings in tow, as had Sakura’s two uncles and their various spawn. Sakura’s Uncle Toru had been married four times (that Sakura knew of), and some of his older kids hadn’t been able to get away from their apprenticeships, but all the younger ones were there. Sakura added Minako’s dish to the other ones and put the diaper bag next to one of the picnic tables, while Minako shepherded her small family over to her mother’s side.

While the (other) adults drank and grilled, Sakura played ninja with her (now much younger) cousins – she was the S-class missing nin that the younger kids had to band together to capture – and around them, other members of the extended family straggled into the party pavilion with dinner dishes and stories.

Thanks to Uncle Toru’s incredible fecundity, it was family tradition that the adults sat at one table while the children old enough to feed themselves ate at another table. This in turn meant that formally congratulating Sakura required everyone at _both_ tables to quiet down so that her congratulations could be heard. Sakura left that monumental task to Uncle Toru and her father, only jumping in to thank her older relations for their well-wishes and say, “Actually, there’s a favor that all of you could do for me. I want to test a seal that I modified…”

When Sakura saw her relations’ faces sharpen with interest, she knew that she had them.

What occurred next was the most epic game of ninja-style hide and seek that her family had ever had. Ever. And Sakura regretted nothing… not even when she had to sit in the tree outside of Sasuke’s bedroom window later that night to watch him breathe for awhile.

_Someday soon, I’m going to slap a seal on his ass,_ vowed Sakura. _And maybe doing something about his diet; he’s looking a little thin._

Dinner wasn’t in her usual wheelhouse, of course, but Sasuke had to be protected no matter what – even if it was just from starvation.

 

 

 

Sakura didn’t _actually_ slap a seal on Sasuke’s ass. That would’ve been way too obvious. And she would’ve had to touch Sasuke’s bare ass. Given the current state of affairs between them, that would have been unspeakably awkward at best.

Instead, she used the last of her black chakra-infusible sealing ink to take a page out of Minako’s book and put a small tracking seal under Sasuke’s black hair. He never even noticed… probably because of the medical jutsu that she was using to keep him under, but Sakura preferred to think that it was her returning ninja skills at work. She’d gotten past his (nonexistent) ninja guards, hadn’t she?

Before she left, Sakura slipped a box of onigiri in Sasuke’s refrigerator, because Sakura was thoughtful like that. And also because that sliver of Itachi was worried sick that Sasuke might starve to death. Apparently, only he was allowed to make Sasuke suffer.

Sealing Sasuke helped a little… but not as much as she had thought it would. Being able to find Sasuke quickly cut down on time wasted looking for him, at least, and it allowed Sakura to keep a training schedule. _That,_ at least, made Sakura’s training go much more smoothly.

The next couple of weeks of Sakura’s summer were dedicated to conditioning until she collapsed, target practice, and taijutsu forms. Every day, she got up before dawn and ate a large, well-balanced breakfast. Then she grabbed her packed lunch, retrieved her water bottles from the freezer, her sports drinks from the refrigerator, and grabbed her map of Konohagakure before she went outside to do warm up stretches on the front lawn. Sakura jogged down to the academy’s training grounds, picking the locks before the sun had even risen and locking up after herself after the sun had set for the day.

Ostensibly, the academy was closed for the summer, and Sakura certainly never ran into anyone while she was there, but her regular use of the facilities couldn’t possibly have gone unnoticed. Such a thing was impossible inside of a ninja village. But no one ever challenged her presence directly or even indirectly, so Sakura took it as permission. She was careful to leave everything as she had found it, undamaged and only a little worse for the wear.

And if she jogged past Sasuke’s place on the way home – and then climbed the tree outside his apartment building so that she could watch him for a few minutes through his window – well, that was Sasuke’s fault. (And Itachi’s obviously.) He should really invest in some curtains – or even some blinds.

Luckily, Sakura was _shinobi._ Or at least, she was going to become one. Stalking a boy and spying on him through his windows was the sort of stupid shit that a kunoichi might do when she fell in love. You know, before she got serious.

Orientation came and went, Sakura listening carefully as the trainers explained her duties and responsibilities as a field ninja, the current organizational structure that ruled the medical ninja ranks, the current professional canons, and the policies, procedures, rules, and codes currently in place in the hospital. At the end of orientation, Sakura was given a packet of papers, one of which listed all of professional modules, workshops, and lectures that would be offered by the hospital that year. As silly as it was, Sakura’s heart fluttered at the list of classroom opportunities laid out before her. Sakura always had liked learning.

Flipping ahead, Sakura planned what she would take over the summer by deciding which courses she would probably have time to take during the school year. It was all rudimentary stuff, something that might have dimmed Sakura’s enthusiasm under other circumstances, but the prospect of getting paid to review basic theory and techniques perked her right back up again.

_The things I do for easy money,_ thought Sakura wryly, as she signed up for the month long introductory module. Sakura would have to attend three-hour classes three times a week, effectively losing nine hours a week to the hospital, but it couldn’t be helped. If Sakura’s training was going to yield the results that she was after, she needed a supply of her Medical Pills.

Except it wasn’t that easy, because nothing in Sakura’s life was ever that easy.

While her strength, physical condition, and stamina all improved by leaps and bounds with the addition of her medical supplements, her younger body’s reflexes were still shit. She never could have dodged Sasori’s senbon with a body that was so slow to do what Sakura wanted.

_I need a training partner,_ Sakura decided unhappily. _They’ve got to be fast, scary, and willing to throw pointed objects at me. Some skill at taijutsu wouldn’t go amiss either._

A lingering fear of death, Sakura had always supposed, had been part of what made Tsunade’s training so effective.

Except at eleven, Sakura hadn’t known anyone like that.

It was unfortunate – almost as unfortunate as the Hyuuga that Sakura spotted loitering under a tree in the hospital grounds one afternoon. Changing directions, Sakura went to see what that was about.

At her approach the older boy – late teens with brown hair, eyes that gleamed like opals in the sunlight, and a meticulously covered forehead – glared at Sakura. He looked like death warmed over.

_Someone,_ she decided, _ought to look into that._

“Get lost, brat,” snapped the Hyuuga, and Sakura ignored him, choosing instead to kneel beside him.

“It’s just a diagnostics jutsu,” said Sakura, as she raised her hands between them, and the Hyuuga snorted. But he didn’t try to interfere, the veins around his eyes bulging as he watched Sakura work.

It was the work of a moment to understand what was wrong with him.

“Your injuries are healing nicely,” said Sakura, sitting back on her heels, “but your chakra is nearly exhausted. If you aren’t careful, you’ll have to go back to your bed in the hospital.”

“I can’t stay there,” scoffed the Hyuuga. “I’ve got things to do.”

If he were really capable of accomplishing any of those things, he probably would have left then. Instead, he sat where he was and glared at Sakura, obviously willing her to leave first so that he could hide his weakness.

Sakura considered him, weighing her options. He wasn’t scary, but almost by definition Hyuuga were fast and good at taijutsu. And he might be willing to toss a few kunai at her. Best of all, ninja were secretive by trade, if not necessarily nature, and clan ninja were more secretive than most. If this Hyuuga discovered a secret training shortcut – say, an academy student with amazing supplements – he wouldn’t be likely to spread it around. She just needed to make him want to train with her.

“What rank are you?” demanded Sakura, wavering. “Genin?”

She wasn’t willing to go below a chuunin in her training partner. She was eleven, but she still had standards, damn it!

“Chuunin!” snapped the Hyuuga, and Sakura was relieved. “I’m a _chuunin_ level shinobi, and my name is Hyuuga Tokuma.”

“All right, Hyuuga Tokuma,” said Sakura, coming to a decision. “I have a proposition for you. I have a supply of medical pills that will help you heal up faster. Take one pill twice a day, every day for a week, and you’ll be almost back to rights. But for each pill I give you, you owe me an hour of your time. I need a training partner.”

The Hyuuga narrowed his eyes at her.

“Soldier pills won’t help me,” he said flatly. “Soldier pills are what got me into this mess to begin with.”

“Did I offer you soldier pills?” demanded Sakura tartly, and the Hyuuga scowled.

“What are they then?”

“Supplements,” said Sakura, as she flipped open one of her books, “to be used when training hard or to speed recovery from injury or chakra exhaustion. I make them myself, and I take them myself. The recipe is an old family secret.”

With clan-affiliated shinobi, that last phrase usually signaled the end of a line of inquiry – clan secrets were sacrosanct – and true to form, the Hyuuga immediately stopped asking uncomfortable questions.

Though it pained her to do it, Sakura ripped the title page out of one of her books and folded it into a box. Into the box, she carefully counted fourteen pills from her pill container. It was nearly her entire current stash of Medical Pills.

_I’ll have to take another module,_ thought Sakura unhappily.

“They look like Soldier Pills,” said the Hyuuga.

“Well, they aren’t,” said Sakura, aggrieved even though he wasn’t the first to say it.

_Perhaps I should add food coloring?_ wondered Sakura, suddenly feeling morose.

On that last mission to Suna, even Kakashi-sensei had accused her of taking soldier pills when he had caught her taking one of her supplements, and he of all people should have known better.

“Look, I’m not going to take unknown pills offered to me by an unknown person,” said the Hyuuga bluntly, interrupting Sakura’s grief.

Food coloring was serious business.

“Fair enough,” said Sakura. She plucked a pill from her pill container. “Watching?”

Then, after he had activated his byakugan, Sakura popped the pill into her mouth and chewed.

If that had been a Soldier Pill, she would have had to re-grow teeth.

And also scrape her teeth over her tongue. Swallowed whole or not, Soldier Pills had a unique flavor designed to bloom at the first hint of saliva. It was one of the many ways that Konohagakure’s medical ranks tried to subtly persuade their colleagues not to abuse the damn things, because Soldier Pills were dangerous. They invoked an immediate reaction in the user’s body, a boost of extraordinary power now to be paid for dearly later. Sakura’s pills were the opposite. While the immediate effects were small, sometimes even negligible, their effects were felt in the longer term.

“See?” said Sakura, after several minutes in which her body’s systems didn’t kick into overdrive. “Not a Soldier Pill.”

“Why are you doing this?” demanded the Hyuuga, the veins around his eyes gently bulging as he studied her carefully.

“Because I need help, and so do you,” said Sakura, resigned. She gently twisted the sides of the origami box, forcing its top to spiral shut. “And don’t even think about stiffing me.”

The Hyuuga straightened his shoulders, and even with the veins in his face bulging, it was easy to see his offense in his expression. “I’m a _Hyuuga,”_ said the boy stiffly.

“Yeah, I know,” said Sakura. With those eyes, everyone knew it.

Hinata and Neji had been okay – eventually – but most of the Hyuuga that Sakura had run into across the years had been total dickbags. It had been a struggle not to strangle them with their own hair. Tsunade had always said it was the lack of counterbalance – before, the Hyuuga had always had the Uchiha and the Senju to pull against them. In their absence, Hyuuga had been the largest clan in the village – and unopposed, save for those rare occasions that a handful of other clans could put their differences aside and come to a consensus. Hyuuga had been running roughshod over everyone that wasn’t a Yamanaka, Nara, or Akimichi for years. Why that had extended to Sakura and Shizune, as Tsunade’s apprentices, Sakura had never been certain; guilt by association, perhaps.

But Sakura needed the other chuunin’s help, so she relented, choosing expedience over righteousness when she added, “I like your clan’s heir well enough, but some of the others…”

The boy’s face tightened, and he looked away.

“Far enough,” he told the oak tree. His hand scooped the package out of Sakura’s hands. Rattling the origami box at Sakura, he said “If these work, I’ll come find you. You have _my_ word on that.”

“All right,” said Sakura, and he whipped around to blink at her. Holding a pill out to him, she said, “One for the road?”

After a moment, he accepted it, swallowing it with the ease of practice.

Sakura pretended not to notice when he turned first grey and then green. They didn’t taste _that_ bad!

Standing, Sakura offered the Hyuuga a hand up – one that he grudgingly took. Hauling him to his feet was harder than she liked to admit, even to herself. A flare of irritation at her body’s limitations, and Sakura let it go, choosing instead to smile up at her new training partner.

“I’m Haruno Sakura. And I’ll see you soon. Bye!” And with a wave, Sakura left, jogging towards her class. If she hurried, she wouldn’t be _too_ late.

_Not that any student of Hatake Kakashi’s should worry about being too late to anything, ever,_ thought Sakura, and grinned.

 

 

 

One evening, Sakura came home from training to find an assortment of her cousins sitting on the flight of stairs connecting the side door to the apartment over her parents’ shop with the street outside. Sakura tensed, but she smiled that wide, fake smile that so very many people had believed over the years, and her assorted cousins were no different. They smiled back.

“Sorry, am I late for something?” she asked, feeling guilty.

“No!” said Yuki quickly, her fist coming up between them. “We just thought you’d be home sooner.”

“Sorry,” said Sakura again, even though she still had no idea what she was apologizing for.

“Never mind,” said Tadashi, his hand moving through the air as if to brush her words away. An older cousin, Sakura watched with interest as a delicate flush rose in his face. “The younger kids have been asking for a few weeks, and we decided to wait until you finished your introductory module at the hospital before asking, and… do you want to play hide and seek?”

“Using that seal from the picnic!” piped up little Shinichi, and Sakura grinned.

“Sure!” she said. She was exhausted, but she could always use more practice. And there were some adjustments that she had been thinking about making to it. Now would be as good a time to test them as any. “Let me just put my training gear in my room?”

Sakura had assumed that they had only wanted to play with her that night, but somehow, from then on, Sakura’s Thursday nights became the nights that she played with her cousins. She didn’t really mind. And if Sakura tried new or different variations on her seals on them, no one seemed to mind that either.

 

 

 

“You practice at the academy?” asked a voice, scornfully. “Really?”

Another push up, and Sakura collapsed onto her side. She rolled onto her back and, raising one hand against the sun, smiled at the silhouette looming over her.

“It’s not like I have access to any of the village’s training grounds.”

Those were for genin level shinobi and higher.

“Well, I do,” said the boy’s voice, and he offered a hand to Sakura. She let him haul her to her feet. Upright, Sakura could see that he looked much better than the last time that she had seen him. He was also frowning at her, that same heavy disapproval that Neji and Hinata’s father had mastered. Maybe it was genetic?

“When we practice together, it’ll be on a proper training field,” said Hyuuga Tokuma haughtily, and Sakura nodded, because it didn’t matter to her where they practiced together, so long as they did.

After that, Tokuma slotted neatly into Sakura’s training schedule, claiming three two-hour blocks of time from Sakura’s work week as his own. He wasn’t as fast or ruthless or skilled as her Tsunade-shisho or Shizune, but he was still too much for Sakura’s current self to keep up with – which, although depressing, was good. It was great even. Sakura could literally feel herself improving during her training against Tokuma. She just wished that she didn’t need to improve _so much._

Sometimes, Sakura dreamed about crushing him with one monstrously strong fist. (She would put him back together again afterward, of course.)

“Why are you doing all this any way?” asked Tokuma once. “You aren’t going to be a combat nin. Your dream is to be a medic nin, isn’t it?”

The question brought Sakura up short.

Across two lifetimes and maybe five years, not once had anyone ever bothered to ask her that.

Not _once._

“No,” said Sakura, surprising herself. “It’s not. It never was.”

It was the truth, but it was a truth that she had never said out loud before, because it hadn’t been important. Not to her and not to anyone else either; she had needed training, and Tsunade was willing to give it to her.

Tokuma arched his eyebrows at her, surprised.

Sakura shrugged. Looking away from him, she said, “I’m a first generation ninja. I have to take my training where I can get it. And I really _don’t_ want my teammates to die, not if I can help it. I… like being useful.”

“But – your medical pills –”

“I didn’t say I wasn’t _good_ at medical jutsu,” said Sakura sharply, looking back at the Hyuuga. “If anyone from outside a clan was ever hailed as a genius, I’d be considered a genius where medical jutsu is concerned. And why not? I’m intelligent, I have an eidetic memory, and my chakra control is flawless. And I work hard at it. But that doesn’t mean that I always wanted to be a medical nin. It was just… necessary to achieve my dreams.”

Naruto had been claimed by Jiraiya, Sasuke by Orochimaru, and she would have been damned before she let herself be left behind by them again. Sakura had scraped together her courage and asked Tsunade to train her, because Tsunade had been the last sannin left unclaimed, not because she had possessed a burning desire to heal the wounded or be the last man standing in every squad.

And truthfully, she might not have asked the most famous medic nin in the world for training even then, if she had thought that Kakashi-sensei might train her up properly. But the writing had been on the wall, at least with regards to her sensei’s regard for her, and Sakura had been out of options. To this day, Sakura didn’t know what she would have done – _could_ have done – if Tsunade hadn’t taken pity on her back then.

For that – and everything else – Sakura owed the Slug Sannin.

A flicker of hard earned instinct, and Sakura’s hand snapped up to clamp around Tokuma’s wrist. She blinked at the older boy, his wrist warm against her palm.

“You’re getting better at that,” Tokuma said, and he smiled. “I think you’ve got your breath back. Want to get back to it?”

Sakura smiled and nodded. “Sure.”

Near the end of his fifteen hours, Tokuma asked for another supply of her Medical Pills for his own training.

“At the same rate,” he added, and Sakura happily assented. Finally, something was going her way!

“And maybe they could taste… not completely horrible?” asked Tokuma warily, and Sakura scowled.

“No,” she said shortly. “Making them taste better would make them less effective.”

Only _slightly_ less effective, but Sakura hated to waste effort. As Tsunade’s apprentice, she had learned to hate waste. (Excess, however, had been another matter.)

Tokuma grimaced. “I’m willing to take that risk.”

_“I’m_ not,” Sakura retorted sharply. “I have my pride as a medic nin to think of.”

An odd look flashed across Tokuma’s face. After a beat, he added, “What about food coloring? That way, they won’t look like soldier pills.”

“It’s too late!” said Sakura indignantly. “I already made my next batch.”

“Well, maybe for next time then,” said Tokuma easily, and Sakura rolled her eyes.

“Annoying,” she proclaimed. “You’re so _annoying!”_

Tokuma laughed.

 

 

 

Eventually, Tokuma brought Aburame Muta and Hijiri Shimon by, saying that his old genin squad mates were interested in obtaining a supply of Sakura’s supplements too and at the same rates as Tokuma. Willfully overlooking how much Shimon looked like Sasuke – but with better hair – Sakura blithely damned herself to a third training module at the hospital for the promise of more people to train against before the beginning of the fall term at the Ninja Academy.

And suddenly, Sakura’s training schedule was so much busier. And better, because she was finally getting better by the day.

From there, it was a countdown of weeks and days until the Uzushio Quarter’s annual celebration, and her eventual return to school. Despite the looming threat of the fall term, Sakura’s excitement ratcheted higher with every day that she crossed off of her calendar. She nearly couldn’t wait for the annual celebration!

Stretching between the remnants of the Old Wall and the village’s current outer walls, the Uzushio Quarter had not started out as one of Konohagakure’s districts. It had, in fact, begun as a shanty town. It had been a slum slouched against the village’s outer walls and filled with Uzushio’s refugees.

Sandaime had ordered the Uzushio Quarter enclosed within the village’s perimeter after the end of the Second Shinobi War. That in turn had necessarily led to the enclosure of the chuunins’ stadium, which stood to the north of the Uzushio quarter, as well as the Nara, Aburame, and Hatake lands within the village’s perimeter.

The Sand-Sound invasion had been reliant on the stadium’s position within the village’s walls. And sandwiched as the Uzushio Quarter was between the stadium in which the chunin exams were held, the outer wall, and the Main Road, which cut straight from the village’s Main Gates to the Hokage’s office, the district had been at the center of the fighting. During the invasion, Uzushio Quarter’s mostly civilian population had taken nearly catastrophic losses. Everyone had lost someone, including Sakura. Some people had lost _everyone._

After the Sand-Sound Invasion, most Uzushio had chosen to leave the village for one of the Uzushio enclaves on the coast rather than trying to rebuild in Konohagakure. What remained of Sakura’s family had left with the others, and within a matter of months, Sakura had found herself one of the very few of Uzushio descent left in the Leaf village. It had been hard and lonely, mostly in ways that Sakura could not have anticipated when she had said goodbye to her family at the gates.

And in the end, even she had abandoned the Uzushio Quarter.

It had been the only way to avoid the strange new buildings going up where her district had been. The Uzushio Quarter – which had kept its name, despite the enormous lack of Uzushio living there – had become somewhere else entirely. The quarter and its comfort, its familiarity, and its annual celebrations had become yet more things lost to Sakura in the wake of the Sand-Sound invasion.

Now, she couldn’t _wait_ to celebrate Uzushiogakure’s founding!

With her whole family!

And all her friends!

Sakura’s first impulse was to go kick down a few doors and invite everyone she knew to the party. Tsunade-shisho needed cheering up, Kakashi-sensei needed to get out more, and Captain Yamato so liked to be included in things. Sasuke, Naruto, and Sai had probably never even been invited to a party before. And Shizune and the others deserved to have some fun!

Except she didn’t know any of those people now; she hadn’t even met Naruto yet. And she wasn’t yet on friendly terms with most of the Konoha Eleven.

She could have invited them anyway, but just thinking it was enough to set off Itachi’s compulsion; kicking down doors wasn’t discreet, and she had to be discreet if she was going to stay close enough to protect Sasuke. And she _had_ to protect Sasuke! She couldn’t allow Sasuke to die a second time!

Rolling her eyes at herself – and Itachi – Sakura settled for inviting people that she already knew.

Ino would be there, of course – they weren’t feuding – and she could invite Shikamaru and Choji, if she wanted. Never certain if they were her friends or just putting up with her for Ino’s sake, Sakura had never quite scraped up the courage to invite them before the Chuunin Exams the last time around. After it, there had been no more annual celebrations to agonize about not inviting them to.

Sakura wanted them to come now.

“I’ve heard that there’s barbequed pork,” said Choji consideringly, when Sakura invited him.

As a child, such an answer would have hurt her feelings. She would have been insulted. Now, Sakura smiled.

“Roasted pig,” corrected Sakura cheerfully, because while the two methods of cooking were similar, she didn’t want Choji to be disappointed by the difference in flavors. “There will be fish, shellfish, and even chicken, if you don’t like it.”

“Well, if you’re sure that I can come,” said this younger, still uncertain version of Choji, his voice quivering, and Sakura beamed.

“I’m sure, I’m sure!” said Sakura eagerly. “You’ll come?”

“Yes,” said Choji, after flicking a quick look to his mother.

“Great!” Sakura enthused. “Ino will probably be there too. She comes every year. And I’m going to invite Shikamaru this year too.”

At that, Choji’s shoulders relaxed and his smile widened, becoming more real.

Sakura nearly laughed. Instead, she said a few more small things, and then took her leave. She ate dango on the walk to the Nara lands, arriving with sticky fingers and a wide smile. By following the path, Sakura ended up at the headman’s house.

When Sakura knocked, no one answered. She knocked again, harder, and a voice murmured in her ear, “They’re out. Can I help you?”

Startling, Sakura spun around.

No one; she was the only person standing in front of the headman’s house.

Turning in another, slower circle, Sakura eyed the scattering of Nara cottages suspiciously, looking for the source of the jutsu.

“Second house to the right of Shikaku’s,” said the woman’s voice. “You’ll find me out back.”

Following the voice’s directions, Sakura stepped behind the cottage to find a brown-haired woman hanging out her laundry.

“Shikamaru,” said Sakura, skipping the formalities because she had yet to meet the Nara who had use for them as anything other than a delaying tactic. “Do you know where he is?”

“He and his father are out,” said the Nara woman.

“Can you tell me where?” asked Sakura, one hand clutching the other. “It’s important.”

The kunoichi glanced her way, dark eyes lingering, and then smiled. The directions that she gave were to a training ground – surprisingly, _not_ one of the ones belonging to the Nara clan.

“Thank you!” said Sakura, and took off running for Training Ground Five.

When she found them, Shikamaru and his father were lying on the slope of a hill. Shikamaru was cloud watching, his father napping next to him, although Sakura thought that she saw a flicker of dark eyes beneath the elder Nara’s dark lashes.

“Will you come to the Uzushio Quarter’s annual celebration with me?” asked Sakura, startling Shikamaru badly. “Ino and Choji will be there,” added Sakura, when her classmate continued to stare at her with wide eyes. “And there will be old men to play shogi with.”

Shikaku smiled, his eyes still firmly closed.

“Yeah, I’ll come,” Shikamaru sighed, and Sakura smiled.

She wished that she had realized sooner that Choji was too nice – and Shiamaru too lazy – to pretend to be her friend if he wasn’t. It would have made so many things so much easier.

Surprisingly, Ino was the hardest member of the Ino-Shika-Cho formation to cajole into coming. And it wasn’t just because she was out of the village, shadowing her father on a mission, the first three times that Sakura swung by the Yamanaka compound to ask. Sakura had been haunting the Main Gate, waiting for them to return so that she could invite Ino.

And then Ino turned her down!

“But why not?” demanded Sakura. Sakura had invited her every year since their first year in the academy. And Ino had come every year except for the ones that they were feuding. They weren’t even feuding this time!

_“You_ were the one that said we were rivals!”

“Well, yes,” admitted Sakura, surprised, as she skipped a step to keep up, “but I wanted it to be fun like those two old perverts.” At Ino’s indignant look, Sakura hurried to add, “The loud guy with the terrible eyebrows? He’s very… green. And very loud. And his rival is this old man who’s always reading adult books in public. They run past the Uzushio Quarter sometimes…”

On Ino’s other side, her father missed a step. A suspicious noise escaped him, one that was nearly was nearly drown out by Ino’s indignant cry of, “And which pervert am I? The loudmouth or the old one?”

Sakura’s crushed her first response – it was too mean to say too this younger, softer Ino – and instead looped her arms around one of Ino’s, saying cheerfully, “You’re my best eternal rival!”

“Sakura, I’m _sweaty,”_ complained Ino, but she didn’t shrug Sakura off. Sakura chose to count that as a minor victory.

Leaning against Ino’s shoulder, Sakura crooned, “Shikamaru and Choji are coming this year. They’d be disappointed if you didn’t come too.”

Ino pulled back far enough to frown at her. “You invited them?”

Sakura shrugged, feeling unaccountably awkward under Ino’s piercing gaze.

Ino’s sudden grin lit up her face.

“Good,” she said with obvious satisfaction.

“So you’ll come?” pressed Sakura.

“Well, if Choji and Shikamaru and my best rival are going to be there…”

“Thank you!” yelped Sakura, and she hugged Ino – and her arm – tightly.

“Sakura! Sweaty!”

Sakura laughed.

 

 

 

Sakura’s last invitation was a matter of chance rather than careful planning on her part.

She had been on her way to the hospital, running because it was an easy way to get some extra training in, when she and the wall of olive and blue in front of her both dodged right – he to avoid the sudden appearance of a familiar pug and her to avoid the sudden jut of the front end of a baby carriage from a shop.

“Oof!” Sakura gasped, as the wall of muscle knocked the breath out of her. She reeled backwards, a hand catching her by the shoulder before she actually fell over.

Looking up, Sakura’s mouth fell open.

Captain Yamato gazed placidly down at her. And he was so completely, wonderfully, _not_ on fire!

“Are you okay?” he asked, and Sakura nodded, still stunned. A moment later, she remembered her mouth and snapped it shut.

“I’m fine,” she said. “And you? Are you okay? Did I hurt you?”

And then, to her distant horror, she actually began patting at him. Even she wasn’t sure if she was looking for bruises or tiny tongues of flames.

At that, Captain Yamato actually smiled down at her.

“I’m fine,” he gently assured her.

A flicker of moment at the corner of her eye drew Sakura’s attention back to the little pug. He trotted over to Captain Yamato’s side and leaned against his ankle, looking up at him with soulful eyes. Captain Yamato tended to keep his emotions to himself, except when he was drunk, but Sakura could have sworn that he nearly sighed at Pakkun.

Kakashi-sensei tended to have that effect on people.

“Do you know the annual celebration?” Sakura asked on impulse. “The one in the Uzushio Quarter?”

Captain Yamato blinked at her. He looked surprised.

“Yes,” he said slowly, but he didn’t ask why. Sakura elaborated anyway.

“You should come this year,” said Sakura. “You could be my guest!”

Captain Yamato nearly smiled again. “Thank you, but I think I’ll be out of the village then.”

“Are you sure?” pouted Sakura. At his inclined head, she said, “Well, if you _are_ in the village, come by! Everyone will be happy to see you!”

Well, _she_ would, and that was what was really important.

But three out of four wasn’t bad.

 

 

 

Sakura’s mother had signed up to bring three dishes to the neighborhood party.

“I thought that we could work on them together the day before,” said her mother. “Your cuts are always so neat,” and Sakura nodded.

“Sure!” said Sakura, while mentally rearranging her schedule. If she got up early, she would still be able to do a respectable amount of training anyway. Muta preferred to spar in the very early morning anyway. “I have a class to attend that day, but otherwise, I can help.”

Not that she was much help.

In this, at least, Sakura did not have to pretend any degree of ineptitude. She had never been particularly good at cooking, and it wasn’t something that she had improved at during the intervening years. If anything, she had somehow gotten worse at it.

Sakura’s mother ended up doing the lion’s share of the work, but Sakura helpfully did the lion’s share of the cutting, chopping, beater licking, and bite tasting. It was a division of labor that seemed to suit them both, and the dishes were ready in plenty of time for set up.

That night, Sakura went to bed with butterflies swooping through her belly and a wide grin. She could hardly wait! And she hardly slept a wink, bouncing out of bed even at the first blush of dawn.

The next morning dawned bright and clear, and Sakura went down to the Main Road to wait for Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji. They ambled into view – Shikamaru with his hands tucked behind his head, Choji already snacking, and Ino chattering brightly to the boys about something – and they already looked so much like the people that they were going to grow up to be that Sakura had to blink hard against a sudden rush of tears. Happy tears, this time.

“You’re not going to _cry,_ are you, Forehead?” demanded Ino, breaking off mid-word to sneer at Sakura. Well, it was probably meant to be a sneer. Mostly, she sounded worried.

Sakura shook her head, swallowing hard against the lump in her throat.

“No!” she said indignantly even as she dashed a wrist across her eyes – for appearances’ sake, not because they were wet. “I’m just… really happy to see you all. Come on! I’ll show you where we’re going!”

And so saying, Sakura looped her arms around one of Shikamaru’s, dragging it down so that she could hold onto him. Ino grabbed one of her arms and one of Choji’s, who complained about the way that squashed his bag of chips against his chest.

“Each neighborhood has their own celebration,” said Sakura, as they threaded their way through the growing crowd, their linked arms making them into a human chain. “We play games all day, and every family brings food to the feast! And at night, all the neighborhoods have a fireworks competition against all of the other neighborhoods!”

“Everyone knows about the fireworks,” said Shikamaru. “All the noise and smoke is so troublesome.”

“Shut _up,_ Shikamaru!” hissed Ino, because at eleven a comment like that probably would have upset Sakura terribly.

At the same time, Sakura said fiercely, “The village is _lucky_ that it gets to see our fireworks!”

From Sakura’s admittedly hazy memories, Uzushio fireworks were something to behold. When the other Uzushio had left Konohagakure, they had taken most of Leaf’s fun and frivolity with them. Or maybe they had just taken Sakura’s.

Pushing that thought away – and ignoring Shikamaru’s snort – Sakura said, “I know that I promised you old men to play against, but my cousin Hanako was on the shogi committee this year, so now your name is down to play one of the games against one of the shogi masters.”

“I’m _what?”_ demanded Shikamaru sharply, and he missed a step, lurching against her.

“We hire shogi masters and set up tables in a square around them, so that each master can play ten games of shogi simultaneously against ten amateur shogi players. They do this five times, and by the end of the morning, every shogi master has played fifty games. I thought that you might want to do some surveillance before your match, so you’re signed up for Master Wu’s third heat. And right now, we’re going over to help set up the tables and boards that you’re going to be playing on.”

They did, Ino grumbling the whole time about Shikamaru’s old man hobbies, and then they left Shikamaru to it.

Together, Sakura, Ino, and Choji cut through one of the other parks on their way back to the game tables, and Sakura pulled up short among the maze of dog-eared used books. Going back a few steps to the thing that she had seen from the corner of her eye, Sakura teased an older paperback out from between its neighbors.

_The Tale of the Utterly Gutsy Shinobi_ read its title. The book was by Jiraiya. Strangely, it didn’t have a single content warning printed on its cover or, Sakura discovered during a quick flip through, a single illustration of a naked woman.

It was actually kind of a letdown.

“Sa-ku-ra!” called Ino impatiently. “Buy it or don’t! We’re going to miss the window for sign ups!”

Sakura glanced at the price then passed the smiling red-headed woman behind the table a few coppers.

“Thanks!” Sakura chirped before running off to rejoin her friends.

Sakura, Ino, and Choji were nearly to one of the game tables, when there was a shout, and they turned to find one of Choji’s cousins sailing towards them, her sheer size and unwavering pace parting the crowd around her.

Ino made an impatient noise. Under her breath, she hissed, “We’re going to miss the four-legged race!”

“Probably,” Sakura agreed as Choji moved to greet his kinswoman. “But she’s already seen us.”

Ino huffed out a breath. “We’d better make the egg toss,” she grumbled just before Choji introduced them to his second cousin, Akimichi Aiko.

“She’s one of this year’s judges in the baked goods division!” said Choji happily, and Sakura could see where this was headed. Judging by the momentary slump of her shoulders, so could Ino.

In no time at all, Akimichi Aiko had taken Choji in hand, and with a cheery wave, Choji went to taste the best baked goods that the Uzushio Quarter had to offer.

“And then there were two,” said Ino gloomily.

“Which is exactly how many people you need for a _three_ -legged race,” said Sakura cheerfully, and Ino brightened again.

“And the egg toss,” added Ino slyly.

“And the wheelbarrow race,” said Sakura, although she and Ino had never agreed on who had to be the wheelbarrow, and they grinned at each other.

Sakura and Ino spent the next couple of hours competing in everything that offered a ribbon to the winners, and winning none of them.

There were only a handful of actual ninja in the Uzushio Quarter – most of them chuunin, a couple of genin and jounin, and some grizzled old retirees from Uzushiogakure or the Third Shinobi War – but it was a requirement of citizenship in Konohagakure for immigrants to either attend the Shinobi Academy or send children to it. Everyone who lived in the Uzushio Quarter had been required to either attend the shinobi academy themselves or send at least one or two children to it. Most people failed out of the academy, failed the genin survival exam, or rode out their mandatory initial contract as genin, but everyone still had some degree of ninja training to fall back on in competition. And anyone could invite guests to the annual celebration – including old friends or teammates from outside the district that had grown up to be chuunin or jonin.

It made the competitions fierce.

Ino almost won the poisonous division of the flower arranging contests though, and Sakura’s placement in the kunai toss had been respectable. Choosing to quit on a high note, they went to see how Shikamaru had done in his shogi match. Except it turned out that Shikamaru was _still playing;_ not only that, a crowd had gathered around to watch in intent silence. Ino and Sakura joined the crowd, watching for a time before Ino tugged Sakura away again.

“Come on,” said Ino, after they were a short distance away. “Let’s go get ribbons braided into our hair.”

Sakura nodded, and they did, Ino giving the girls at the table a lot more to work with hair-wise than Sakura did.

They met up with Choji soon after that, and discovered that he now harbored the hope of someday becoming a judge for the pork roasting competition. Apparently, he liked Uzushio-style roasted pork that much. Reunited, the three of them entered one of the three-man squad egg tosses.

“Shikamaru better get done before they open up the scavenger hunts,” said Ino, the corners of her mouth turning down into the beginning of a pout. “You have to have a four man squad to compete!”

Sakura had plenty of cousins that could take Shikamaru’s place in a pinch, and there was even a desk for people who wanted to compete but didn’t have enough close friends to put together a four man squad on their own, but she didn’t say any of that, because she understood. They could play without Shikamaru, but it wouldn’t be the same.

They played a few games – and won exactly none of them – and Sakura was just going to suggest that they get lunch, when Shikamaru found them.

“Took you long enough!” complained Ino.

“Did you win?” asked Sakura, and scowling fiercely, Shikamaru shook his head. He looked grumpy… and at the same time, oddly delighted. Apparently, it had been a very good game.

Over lunch, Shikamaru regaled them with the details of his shogi match – whether Ino wished to be regaled or not – and Choji listened placidly, nodding in all the right places. For herself, Sakura was amused. She had never, in either life, seen Shikamaru so animated.

_Who knew that shogi was the way to get him fired up?_ Sakura wondered, and then bit the inside of her cheek against a laugh when Shikamaru launched into an impassioned explanation of the whirling leaf defense as applied on the shogi board.

After lunch – and at Shikamaru’s insistence – they went to watch a shogi match between two of the masters using an oversize shogi board and life-size pieces.

From there, Ino dragged everyone over to the scavenger hunt signups. It went better than Sakura had expected – for all of his moaning about the troublesomeness of their list, Shikamaru was as competitive as anyone else – but a team made up of jounin and chuunin beat everyone to collecting everything on the list. Team Ino-Shika-Cho-Saku came in one hundred and fifty-seventh. It wasn’t a bad ranking, especially for a team of academy students, but Ino huffed at it.

“At least we did better than last year,” said Sakura. She looked at Choji, who was openly dejected, for a moment before adding, “A lot better. Like, thirty places better,” and Choji brightened.

“We’re finally going to get to do the team obstacle courses at school next year, aren’t we?” said Ino. “We four should be teammates as often as we can. We’ll be unbeatable!”

Choji grinned, and Shikamaru _didn’t_ proclaim Ino’s idea troublesome, which was practically the same as enthusiastic agreement from him. And, her heart warm, Sakura nodded.

Already, things were beginning to turn out better!

At the feast that night, they sat with Sakura’s extended family. Choji, who was willing to try a tiny bit of everything, rhapsodized at length about the various roasted porks he tried as well as the clams and mussels, two kinds of scallops, roasted chicken, shrimp, three kinds of crab, and all the sides. He even liked her Aunt Mai’s balut. Not even Minako and her siblings ate Aunt Mai’s balut. It put everyone within earshot in a great mood, and Sakura could already tell that everyone would be looking forward to seeing Choji again next year.

Afterwards, everyone relaxed on blankets and waited for the sun to finish setting. When it was finally fully dark, fireworks ripped apart the night sky. Delighted, Sakura _ooohh_ and clapped and cheered along with everyone else. It had been _such_ a long time since there had been fireworks or joy or Uzushio in the Uzushio Quarter!

At the very end of the day, Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji all straggled home with Sakura, the four of them curling up in futons arranged on the floor of Sakura’s bedroom. The bedding was tightly packed together, but they didn’t seem to mind.

“Thanks for coming, everyone,” said Sakura sleepily into the semi-darkness of her bedroom. Choji’s breathing was already heavy with sleep. “I had a really good time today.”

Shikamaru grunted, Ino mumbled something incomprehensible, and, smiling, Sakura drifted off to sleep.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>  **Title:** Retrograde Motion  
>  **Fandom:** Naruto  
>  **Rating:** Teen  
>  **Content Notes:** None  
>  **Disclaimer:** I have no rights to or within the Naruto franchises, copyrights, characters or trademarks. This is for fun, not profit.  
>  **Summary:** From sixteen to eleven didn't feel like a big jump until she realized that she was now the best ninja in their class. And that tiny Sasuke hates her for it.  
>  **Additional Notes:** Happy Belated Birthday, Mornelithe_Falconsbane!

 

After Sakura saw her friends off the next morning, she had to help with clean up. _All_ of the Uzushio’s Quarter’s children had to help clean up after festivals. As a kid, Sakura had always hated that part of any large scale celebration.

While at the academy, Sakura had always assumed that getting her forehead protector would spare her that at least. But she hadn’t thought to join any of the adults’ committees during her last year at the academy, so her first year as a genin had seen Sakura cleaning up with all the other kids, the same as always. Angry at herself for being such a kid – for not betting on herself when she had the chance – Sakura had vowed that the next year would be different. She would never clean up after another stranger ever again.

There had never been another annual celebration of Uzushiogakure’s founding, at least, not within Konohagakure’s walls.

And mere months after she made it, Sakura broke her vow. Her first day working in the hospital, Sakura had been assigned the task of cleaning up after a different group of strangers.

_There’s just no escaping it,_ thought Sakura, now seventeen, a chuunin, and resigned to her fate.

But she still hated it.

And this time, she was definitely going to join one of the festival’s committees ahead of time. Sakura was already keeping an eye out for sign ups. Next year, she wasn’t going to pick up a single stranger’s crumpled cup. But in the meantime, there were certain advantages to be found in chatting idly with the other Uzushio children while they worked together to sweep the streets clean.

Several of the other children had younger brothers and sisters at or near sealing age. Of that group, many of them were too young or too civilian to watch what they said to the friendly older girl who hung on their every word.

As far as Sakura could tell, there were half a dozen sealing masters of any repute currently hiding in the Uzushio Quarter, two of which came from the old country. Sakura was fairly confident that the village had no idea that there were any Uzushio sealing masters left alive, let alone living in the village, otherwise the Council of Elders probably wouldn’t have let any of them leave with everyone else after the Sand-Sound Invasion.

What Tsunade-shisho would have done in their place was something that Sakura preferred not to wonder about. Sakura liked to think that her master would have given the Uzushio a reason to stay in the village of their own accord. Tsunade had certainly missed the resources that they had brought to the table. But Sakura had been a sitting Hokage’s apprentice long enough to know that where there was a carrot, there was usually also a stick – unseen, perhaps, but certainly felt when it struck; the larger the carrot, the larger the stick.

In the present time, every family in the Uzushio Quarter had their favorite sealing master, the one whose work that they swore by, including Sakura’s family. Sakura subtly pumped the other kids for information about their family’s preferred sealing masters, because she might eventually need to talk to them all. In an ideal world, one of them would take her on as their apprentice. In a less ideal world, she needed to know who to pay to modify the Four Pillars of Truth Seal... or steal the seal off of so that she could try to modify it herself.

If it was at all possible, Naruto and Gaara’s seals _had_ to be stabilized.

Unfortunately, while the children had strong opinions about the niceness and candy choices of their family’s sealing master, they only had the vaguest ideas of where their family’s sealing master could be found. Tracking them all down was going to take time. Fortunately, Sakura currently had a lot of that.

She decided to start with her family’s sealing master. For one thing, she knew at least two people that would be willing to tell her where to find him. And for another, he was fond of her parents. Nepotism was as good a means of getting what she wanted as any other. And it would be a new experience for her.

Years and years ago, Uzumoto Haruto had come from the old country with a group of orphans that had included Sakura’s parents. Years later, he had put the security seals on their house – and the Four Pillars of Truth Seal on her, of course. Neither of her parents – or any of her aunts, uncles, or cousins – could ever have managed it. And she actually knew where he lived – well, she did after subtly interrogating her parents over dinner that night.

A jounin in the old country, Uzumoto Haruto had died during the Sand-Sound invasion. Sakura had hazy memories of hearing from her grief-stricken parents that he had died while protecting several other people’s escape from the invading nin. Currently, he lived in the apartment over her favorite stationer’s shop. In fact, according to her parents, he _owned_ her favorite stationer’s shop. Sakura didn’t know how she felt about that, especially since she hadn’t even realized that there _was_ an apartment over her favorite stationer’s shop.

Even knowing that it was there, Sakura found it difficult to look in the general direction of where the apartment ought to be. She’d tried all four forms of genjutsu release, and she _still_ couldn’t see the apartment over the stationer’s shop, much less find its door. Even sitting in the tree next to the place where the apartment should be made Sakura’s skin crawl. She wanted to get going and move on. She had things to do and people to see! She definitely didn’t want to stay there. There were definitely better places to practice her genjutsu releases.

Sakura stayed anyway. She always had been too stubborn for her own good.

Crouching on her well-placed bough, Sakura determinedly stared at the place where the apartment above the stationer’s shop ought to be. She tried to think what to do.

It was there. Her parents had said it was there, and they wouldn’t have lied to her about that. But… she couldn’t see it. Or sense it. It wasn’t genjutsu. And she desperately wanted to be anywhere else – even though her objective lay somewhere in that patch of empty air.

_Is it a seal?_ Sakura wondered. If it was, she wanted to see it! But first, she needed to persuade the sealing master to see her… and teach her the Four Pillars of Truth Seal. Fun could come later.

_It would be easiest,_ Sakura eventually decided, _to simply go into the shop and ask to see the owner. I can always break into his place later if that doesn’t work._

Hopping out of her tree eased a great deal of her mental discomfort. There was apparently a proximity component to the seal. Filing that idea away for later contemplation, Sakura went inside the shop.

Inside, Sakura was happy to see her favorite clerk – the kind one that had loaned her money – there and manning the front desk. Even better, they appeared to be alone in the shop. Sakura didn’t see – or sense – anyone else, at least.

“Here for more sealing supplies?” asked the clerk with one of his ghastly smiles. Near his hand was a cup of tea, half drunk but still steaming.

Sakura shook her head. Bowing formally to him, she said, “I would like to make an appointment to speak with the owner of this shop.”

“What do you want?”

“None of your business,” snapped Sakura, Inner Sakura rising close to the surface, and then narrowed her eyes as a thought struck her. She studied the clerk carefully.

Uzumoto Haruto would have been in his twenties when he nominally escorted a band of orphaned children across a hostile landscape to the dubious safety of the shanty town outside of Konohagakure. Slightly more truthfully, the band of orphaned children had dragged his broken body through a war zone, keeping him alive using whatever first aid and household seals they knew. That had been about twenty years ago, putting him in his forties or early fifties.

The clerk _could_ have been in his forties. They would have been hard years.

It wasn’t just his grey hair making him look older than he was. His face was weathered and worn, lined with his grief. Old scars slash across his slightly misaligned face before disappearing down into the collar of his shirt, and he was missing a hand, the sleeve neatly pinned up. There would be other old scars beneath his clothes, Sakura knew. Some old injury had to be the cause of his limp.

Imagining the wounds that he must have had, Sakura wondered how a handful of unhappy orphans with little or no training had managed to keep him alive long enough to get him to Konohagakure.

_“You’re_ the owner, aren’t you,” said Sakura slowly. _“You’re_ Uzumoto Haruto. I can’t believe I promised to make you a storage scroll.”

The clerk stared at Sakura very, very hard. An edge of (unpleasantly potent) killer intent leaked into the space between them, a warning between shinobi. A threat, if Sakura had been only what she appeared to be.

“How do you know that name?” asked the clerk.

“Because I’ve got business with you,” said Sakura, uncowed.

There was a brief silence before all traces of the other’s (unpleasantly potent) killer intent vanished.

“And I still expect to receive my scroll, Haruno,” rasped the clerk. “What do you want?”

_Many things,_ thought Sakura, but she put her most pressing need first.

“It’s about Naruto – Uzumaki Naruto.”

“What about the boy?” demanded the seal master sharply.

“He’s _Uzumaki_ Naruto. He should have the Four Pillars of Truth,” said Sakura. “Why doesn’t he?”

“Ask the Toad Sanin,” said the clerk, still sharp. He half turned away from her, a dismissal. “If that’s all?”

“Can he still be sealed?” Sakura persisted. “If he wants to be?”

Because he would want to be; Sakura would make sure of it.

“No,” said the sealing master.

“Why not?” demanded Sakura. “His seal… He needs it.”

“The Four Pillars of Truth Seal must be applied after a child has developed a sense of self but before the child’s mind ceases to be malleable enough to accept and compensate for the unavoidable changes in their mental landscape. It’s a narrow window of time – and one that closed for Uzumaki Naruto years ago. His children can be Uzushio if he wishes it, but he can never be.”

Sakura scowled. That was _not_ the answer that she had wanted to hear. And Sakura knew enough – about developing her own seal, medical sealing, and (thanks to that bastard Itachi) the human mind, as well as a smidgen about Yamanaka’s mind techniques – to know that modifying such a delicate seal would be the work of decades… _if_ it could be done at all.

She didn’t have _that_ much time!

But if Naruto was too old to receive the Four Pillars of Truth Seal, then the seal _had_ to be modified to suit his circumstances, because an out of control Naruto was a _scary_ Naruto. Sakura couldn’t let that – _any_ of that – happen again, not if there was any way to prevent it.

“Can you teach me the Four Pillars of Truth Seal?” asked Sakura, because simply asking for what she wanted had always served her well in the past.

“The Four Pillars of Truth isn’t a simple seal,” said Uzumoto Haruto. “It takes years of study to develop the level of mastery necessary to be able to properly shape it and successfully apply it.”

“I’m willing to work hard and dedicate myself to mastering the seal of my people,” said Sakura, her voice adopting a more formal note. “If you take me on as your apprentice, I will work hard every day to make you proud of me.”

“I have no doubt that you are and you would,” said the old sealing master gently. “But I don’t want an apprentice.”

Sakura wilted, despair clutching at her throat. She _needed_ this. He didn’t know it yet, but the whole village needed it.

“Please,” said Sakura, her voice wavering. She sounded like she was thirteen and desperate again; mostly, because she _was_ desperate. _“Please._ I need you to do me this favor. I _must_ learn this seal.”

The old man’s face spasmed, some emotion passing over it too quickly for Sakura to identify it, and then his face was empty of emotion again.

_Stupid,_ thought Sakura angrily. _I overplayed my hand. So stupid._

He wasn’t Tsunade, and Team Seven hadn’t just very publicly imploded. Naruto hadn’t even pulled on the kyuubi’s chakra yet. Uzumoto Haruto couldn’t even begin to imagine why this was so important to her.

“Should I find myself in need of an apprentice,” Uzumoto Haruto said very gently. “I’ll bear you in mind.”

There wasn’t much to say after that.

But Sakura wasn’t going to give up. There were at least five other sealing masters of any repute hiding somewhere in her district, and she would find all of them if necessary. Surely, _surely,_ one of them would be willing to teach Sakura the Four Pillars of Truth Seal. She might not have parted on the best of terms with Naruto, but she wasn’t going to abandon him – or the village – to stupid mistakes.

A ninja who abandoned their teammates was worse than trash.

Despite everything that had happened, Sakura still believed that.

 

 

 

Three days later, and after a certain amount of thought, Sakura joined her district’s book fair committee. It was one of the few committees that took members from all of the neighborhoods within the Uzushio Quarter, it played to her strengths, and best of all no one would expect her to do her part by sweeping the streets or picking up other people’s trash after she got her forehead protector. Sakura would be an adult again then, and she was going to be treated like one again then, dammit.

The fact that it might help her dig up information on the other five sealing masters in her district was honestly just a bonus.

There were enquiring sideways looks when Sakura showed up without even the built in excuse of a parent or older cousin in tow and signed into the committee’s ledger, though everyone was much too polite to ask her why she was there. When she was done, Sakura passed the pen off to the person behind her in line and then moved to sit quietly at the side of the room, choosing a vantage point from which she could see everyone else.

Sakura hadn’t learned much from Kakashi, but one of the things that she _had_ learned was the value of information gathering. She didn’t want anything from anyone else on the committee just yet, but when she did, she was going to get what she wanted. _That_ was something that she had learned from Tsunade.

When she got home from the first meeting of the Book Fair Committee, Sakura began work on Ino’s birthday gift. Ino’s birthday was only about two weeks after the new term started, and Sakura didn’t want to have to scramble around looking for a gift at the last minute.

In her previous life, she and Ino had been love rivals by the time that Ino’s eleventh birthday had rolled around. Sakura hadn’t been invited to the celebration, and she wouldn’t be invited again until Ino turned thirteen. This time, Sakura was fairly confident that she was going to be invited, so she needed to come up with a gift.

When Sakura had really been eleven, she probably would have gotten Ino something cute but ultimately useless to a ninja. Now, she was too strapped for cash to even pretend like that was a possibility. Instead, Sakura scraped up her meager funds, counted them carefully, and went to buy supplies at her favorite stationary shop.

“Still working on your storage scrolls?” asked the clerk as he rung her purchases up.

“You know it!” said Sakura cheerfully. She still had hopes of somehow luring him into teaching her. She just hadn’t figured out how yet.

At home, she began work on it.

Storage scrolls weren’t difficult to make, but between her long hours of training, all the Medical Pills that she was making, and her forehead seals, Sakura was nearly as strapped for chakra at any given moment as she was for cash. Before, making Ino’s storage scroll would have been the work of an afternoon. Now, it was the work of thirty minutes a day, every day, for a week. In the end, Sakura was proud of what she had produced.

At sixteen, Ino would have loved it.

Sakura was less certain that at eleven Ino would like such a practical gift.

But it was what she had. And the craftsmanship was some of her best. It was much better than anything that Sakura had ever made before now.

Ino had better pretend to like it.

Looping a blue-black ribbon around the middle of the rolled up scroll, Sakura tied a bow on it then slid the whole thing into a long pink envelope decorated with clouds and stars. It was also from her favorite stationary shop.

_There,_ Sakura thought, feeling pleased with herself. _That’s done. And it even looks like a twelve year old wrapped it._

Her shisho had always said that proper preparation prevented piss poor performance – usually at the top of her lungs and while flinging boulders at her.

Sometimes, Sakura missed Tsunade so fiercely that it hurt.

_Eighteen months, give or take, and then I’ll see her again,_ thought Sakura, doing the calculations yet again. The distance between her and Tsunade never appreciably shortened, but Sakura still found doing the calculations to be comforting.

She wanted everything to be perfect for Tsunade when she came back. (Even though she knew that it wouldn’t be.)

If only she didn’t have to waste so much time at the academy! But to get her forehead protector, she had to graduate. And to graduate, she had to attend.

_And thus begins the world’s most boring training sabbatical,_ thought Sakura wryly, as she packed her lunch for the first day of school.

Sakura wasn’t looking forward to the coming school year. It was going to be the sort of training sabbatical on which she went nowhere and did nothing particularly interesting, but she remained determined to get some benefit from it. That she was equally determined to avoid any undue attention from ROOT or ANBU, however, severely limited her options. And Itachi’s lingering compulsion to protect Sasuke wasn’t doing her any favors either.

Neither was Sandaime’s speech.

Sakura’s last year at the academy had begun the same way as all the others had: with a solemn opening ceremony, during which the Sandaime exhorted them all to do their best for the good of the village and its bright future. His speech was nearly as grave as the ceremony itself.

Watching Sarutobi Hiruzen as he looked down at them with a twinkle in his eyes – seemingly the embodiment of a kindly, indulgent grandfather, one who loved them all dearly enough to be amused instead of annoyed by the ugly, distracting faces that Naruto was making – Sakura admired his façade. It was nearly flawless.

Chiyo had been a devoted grandmother too, and kindly she was not. They were peers, after all, and the veterans of three secret shinobi wars. He couldn’t be _that_ old **_and_ **_that_ nice. But the kindly grandfatherly façade was probably the only reason that he hadn’t yet snapped and punted Naruto through the nearest wall for his latest bit of mischief, so Sakura was willing to be outwardly awed by (his dedication to) his façade for the time being. Although for the record, her Tsunade-shisho never would have stood for that sort of disrespect, not from anyone.

When the Sandaime Hokage got to the bit about them all being branches on the same great tree, Sakura idly wondered if Danzo had heard this speech. _Probably,_ she decided, because Sandaime gave some variation on it every year. He probably whipped some variation of it out for chuunin promotions too. Maybe this speech was where Danzo had gotten the name for ROOT.

And then the opening ceremony was finally over, and Sakura was listening as classroom assignments were called. Tenten, Lee, and Neji were already graduated, and Naruto was in one of the classes two terms ahead of theirs, but everyone else had been assigned to the same class, just like last time.

Delighted, Sakura skipped down the hallway to where Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji were waiting for her at the classroom’s doorway.

“Are you ready for this, Forehead Girl?” demanded Ino, her sharp tones at odds with her bright smile.

“I’m ready to crush you, Pig!” laughed Sakura. “At the end of the year, the position of Number One Rookie will be mine!”

“Tch, how troublesome,” scoffed Shikamaru. “What does it matter where you graduate so long as you do?”

Without waiting for an answer, he turned and led their way into their new classroom.

“Of course, _he_ doesn’t understand,” scoffed Ino in an undertone. “He’s just so _lazy!”_

Sakura laughed.

Shikamaru and Choji chose seats at the back of the classroom with Kiba and the other troublemakers, while Ino and Sakura claimed seats near the front of the classroom. That their seat had a direct sightline to the back of Sasuke’s head soothed the echo of Itachi at the back of her head.

Uchiha Itachi was an S-class criminal. Sakura knew that for a fact. But as she stared at the back of Sasuke’s head – creepily, she was sure – she wondered how Uchiha Itachi ever gotten any serious criminaling done when so much of his focus seemed to revolve around Sasuke, staring at Sasuke, and obsessing over Sasuke’s continued good health. Of course, for all intents and purposes, Sasuke had _died_ shortly before Itachi had laid that compulsion on her. Maybe Itachi had been better – or less actively crazy – before that happened.

It didn’t escape Sakura that she was thinking that about a guy who snapped and murdered his entire family. Well, everyone but the one that he was completely obsessed with.

“All right!” barked Iruka-sensei, as he strode into the room. “Pay attention! As some of you already know, I’m Umino Iruka! And this year, I’m your homeroom teacher!”

Iruka-sensei’s self introduction was the first and last time that Sakura paid full attention to him that year.

Their first day back at the academy after the summer term ended, all academic classes were cancelled in favor of testing students’ skill sets to see what, if anything, they had learned over the summer term. Clan scions usually had a couple new skills to flaunt – and this year, so did Sakura.

Showing a level of restraint that would have made the Slug Princess proud of her, Sakura placed first in _everything._

It felt shockingly good.

_They are eleven and twelve year old academy students,_ Sakura thought fiercely. _You shouldn’t be proud of being better than them at anything. It would be shameful if you weren’t. And the tests were easy. There weren’t even jutsu on them._

And yet, that unreasonable feeling of pride persisted.

Her first time through the academy, skill evaluation days had been Sakura’s least favorite days of the school year. She had looked forward to them with dread. She had learned her assigned forms and done her assigned practice work, but there had never been any hope of closing the gap between her and the clan scions, though she had certainly tried after declaring herself Ino’s love rival.

Now, the clan scions had no hope of closing the gap between her skill set and theirs – not any time in the next few years, at any rate. Sakura wasn’t going to let them.

Ignoring the strange looks – from her peers, their instructors, even from Ino – Sakura did the absolute best that her small, weak body was currently capable of and left school that day with a skip in her step.

Sakura was now officially the best ninja in her class.

She blamed Uchiha Itachi for that.

Bastard.

Ino left with her. The Yamanaka Flower Shop was in downtown Konohagakure, only a few blocks from the Hokage’s Tower and the Shinobi Academy, but that day Ino hurried Sakura past her father’s shop.

“Aren’t you going in?” asked Sakura, nodding at the shop.

Ino shook her head. Her mouth was tight, but she said, “I’ve got a shift at the greenhouses today.”

The Yamanaka clan ghetto was nearly as far out as the Uzushio Quarter. No one lived there – the Yamanaka clan chose to live integrated with the rest of the village – and it was filled with greenhouses, training areas, and the occasional Yamanaka guard or gardener.

“Sakura, how did you do that?” demanded Ino when they were a further distance from the academy.

“Suzume-sensei said that I should do conditioning over the summer, so I did. And then I found someone to help me with a few things,” said Sakura, choosing not to pretend not to know what Ino was asking. She wasn’t Kakashi. Lightly bumping her shoulder against Ino’s, Sakura smiled as she added, “I told you: this year, I’m going to be your best rival. We’re going to get so good!”

Reluctantly, Ino smiled.

 

 

 

Over the next few days, the teachers met with their students to discuss their progress – if any – and release class rankings as of the new term.

Sitting across the table from her teachers, Sakura studied them as they studied her. Suzume-sensei and Daikoku-sensei watched her with cool eyes. Mizuki-sensei and Iruka-sensei were friendlier, but no less interested in her sudden improvement. Sakura chose not to answer any unasked questions – knowledge was its own currency in the Village Hidden in the Leaves – forcing someone to eventually just ask.

That task, as ever, fell to Iruka-sensei. He was the warmest – and most harmless looking – of the assembled teachers. Suzume-sensei and Daikoku-sensei were too cold to fill the role, Mizuke-sensei too sly. When he asked, Sakura simply said, “The summer semester is for training with your clan. Since I don’t come from a ninja clan, I found something that a ninja would value, and traded it for some training with some chuunin. They were very helpful.”

That unleashed a twenty minute lecture on the dangers of blithely trusting unknown ninja, even within the village, enough to make secret side deals with them. Sakura nodded at the appropriate moments and wondered – if students from non-ninja clans weren’t given additional help at school and weren’t supposed to get it from third parties, what _were_ they supposed to do? Besides die – preferably while saving one of their more valuable teammates.

She also wondered what her teachers assumed that she had traded for her additional training. From their overreactions, it was probably something unsavory. She should probably be offended. Maybe she should punch someone? Excpet students weren’t generally allowed to punch instructors outside of training…

Then and there, Sakura renewed her promise. Her graduation was going to be as painful as possible for everyone not named Haruno.

Through gossip, Sakura learned that Sasuke had been ranked as the number two in their class in combat skills. Shino, surprisingly, was the number two in academics. And Ino, like last time, had scored in the top three or four slots in everything, which would have made her first overall in the class – and eventually, their year’s (entirely overlooked) Rookie of the Year – if Sakura hadn’t gone and ranked first in everything. Instead, Ino was ranked number two over all in their class.

Ino, at least, took it well.

“Kunai range, after school,” demanded Ino, while pointing at Sakura accusingly.

It was an echo of the past, reversed but still pleasant.

Sakura smiled. “I’ll be there.”

 

 

 

Sakura’s sense of superiority didn’t get to last long. The very first jutsu that students learned at the academy was the fire starting jutsu.

Sakura had never mastered the fire starting jutsu, and when she used it, she was lucky to produce a few sparks. On Team Seven, she had relied on Sasuke or Kakashi-sensei to start her fires. After Team Seven, she had learned to pack her kindling to her best advantage. Sakura had mastered the art of fire starting with sticks, flints, magnesium, and matches.

While Daikoku-sensei passed among her class, complimenting and criticizing their efforts at starting a fire as appropriate, Sakura mourned the fact that neither of the cauterization jutsu that she knew could be modified enough to reproduce the effect of the basic fire starting jutsu, though one of them could be used to inscribe names into the Memorial Stone. It had always added a certain flair to any funeral that Tsunade had presided over.

But a rookie who couldn’t use the fire starting jutsu to its best effect was a rookie unlikely to earn a perfect score. Such a rookie would be relying on making an above perfect score elsewhere on the graduation exam.

Sakura didn’t have good enough luck to rely on anything but herself. The time had come to master the fire starting jutsu. Or figure out how to fake it. So far, Sakura had not yet figured out how to fake it.

On the bright side, she had perfect marks in literally everything. As the girl who had scraped through her taijutsu classes with a barely passing mark, there was something undeniably satisfying about being undefeated in her taijutsu matches at school. But, as with everything in her new life, there was a dark side even to this: namely, the homework and extra credit assignments.

One didn’t get to be the Number One Rookie (Of All Time… hopefully) without being seen as well rounded in all the classes offered by the academy. That, unfortunately, meant getting perfect marks on all the assigned homework and class work, as well as acing the written tests and skills tests.

Worse, however, was her need to keep cover. At eleven, Sakura had been the type to do all of the extra credit assignments as well as the ones that everyone else did. She couldn’t afford to stop being like that now. Sudden changes in behavior – particularly with no obvious explanation – tended to draw the attention of the village’s intelligence network. While Sakura was uncertain that any civilian child from a hopelessly civilian family would merit anything more than the most cursory of monitoring, it wasn’t worth risking it.

And so Sakura grudgingly spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday afternoons in the academy’s library. As a chuunin, Sakura didn’t particularly need to research her answers to the work assigned by her teachers, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to be seen researching her answers. Sakura wished that there was more interesting information stored at the student library. As it was, there – as in her classes – she had to make her own entertainment.

About a week and a half after the start of the fall term, Shikamaru shoved a battered envelope into Sakura’s hands.

“Here,” he said. “I meant to give this to you, but I forgot.”

And without waiting for an answer, he tucked his hands behind his head and walked away, leaving a bemused Sakura in his wake.

Tearing into the envelope, Sakura fished out a small white card. She read it… and then read it again.

Shikamaru had invited her to his birthday party.

Shikamaru had never invited her to his birthday celebration before.

_Is it because I invited him to the annual celebration?_ Sakura wondered, and then knew that it _had_ to be. It was the first major change to her relationship with Shikamaru from the way that it was last time.

Thinking about it for a moment, Sakura decided that she wasn’t sorry that she had done it. And she didn’t regret it. She just hadn’t expected it to have consequences either.

Things were _changing._

_Although it’s still too early to say if it’s for the better,_ Sakura thought, as she toyed with the card. _What am I even going to get him? What do eleven year old boys like?_

She didn’t know. And she still didn’t know two days later when her cousins came to play ninja. Since some of them were boys, Sakura just asked.

“Lots of things!” said her cousin Reo, who was himself only fourteen. “Get him something that he likes. What does he like?”

“Shogi and naps and cloud watching,” said Sakura immediately. “But he already has a shogi set.”

“Get him a real ninja kunai!” piped up little Shinichi. “That’s what I’d want!”

“Yeah!” yelled several of her cousins, boys and girls alike, and many small fists were waved in her general direction.

Looking at them, Sakura knew that if she ever gave any of them real ninja kunai as a gift, they would probably accidentally cut a finger off. She could reattach it, of course, but she’d probably never hear the end of it.

“He’s from a ninja clan,” said Sakura, hoping to gloss over the question of real ninja kunai. “His family would have a better version of any weapon or ninja tool that I could get him.”

“So give him a seal,” said her cousin Tadashi carelessly.

“A seal,” said Sakura slowly, weighing the idea in her mind as she said the words aloud. “Or a sealed object? He might like one of those.”

She didn’t know that he would _dis_ like getting a storage scroll, at least. And it would be relatively cheap to make. She would have to buy the scroll, but she still had chakra infusible inks left over from making Ino’s storage scroll.

“Can we play now?” whined Yuki, and Sakura nodded.

“Sure!” she said brightly. “Does everyone still have their seals from last time?”

 

 

 

It was bound to happen again.

Sakura still ran (nearly) everywhere as an easy way to get more training in while she went from one place to the next. As her conditioning had improved, her running had gotten faster. But sooner or later, Sakura was bound to run into someone – especially since she couldn’t use chakra to avoid them. The only surprising thing was that it hadn’t happened sooner.

“Oof!” gasped Sakura, as she knocked into several feet of olive-clad muscle. A hand caught her shoulder, steadying her, and Sakura found herself blinking up at Captain Yamato. She beamed, genuinely delighted to see him again.

“Sorry!” chirped Sakura, and her former captain’s hand fell away from her elbow. “Hey, I remember you! Did you make it to the annual celebration in the Uzushio Quarter after all?”

Captain Yamato blinked down at her. “No, I’m afraid not.”

“Too bad!” said Sakura. “Well, there’s still next summer, right? Maybe I’ll see you then! Bye!”

And with a wave, Sakura ran off again – because she had apparently learned absolutely nothing from running into Captain Yamato. When she glanced back – flicking her short hair away from her face as an excuse – Captain Yamato was gone.

 

 

 

Attending yet more classes on topics that she was already familiar with afforded Sakura many opportunities to think about where she was going wrong with the fire starting jutsu, as well as to satisfy Itachi’s compulsion to creepily stare at the living, breathing, and oblivious Sasuke. (And seriously, what was Itachi’s deal with his little brother? It wasn’t sexual, but it certainly wasn’t normal either.)

Since neither of those were particularly fruitful (or stimulating) areas of enquiry, Sakura mostly thought about sealing and the Shodai’s Mokuton jutsu. Wood Release was a bloodline limit by all reports, and not something that Sakura could take for herself, but it was really interesting to think about potential ways and means of reproducing the effect, and when you were trapped in introductory classes all day every day, that was what was really important.

And the introductory classes didn’t end at the classroom door. Fourteen weeks of intense physical conditioning had allowed Sakura to take her rightful place at the top of the class in field exercises, weapons work, and taijutsu class. Survival exercises and solo obstacle courses were a breeze. It was fun to be on top… but it wasn’t very challenging. Skills classes at the academy were only slightly more interesting than academic classes at the academy.

On Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons, Sakura went to the hospital to sit through modules designed to teach new field medics all the basics that were required of them.

There was not a lot required of them.

The three to five hours a week that she spent training with Shimon, Tokuma, and Muta were the highlight of her week, save for the weeks when sealing lessons with her cousin Minako edged them out of the top spot. They were the highlight of _every_ week.

That was probably why Sakura started dying her Medical Pills purple.

“Don’t get the wrong idea,” said Sakura sternly to Muta. “This is just an experiment.”

“Understood,” said the taciturn Aburame, but Sakura thought that he might be smiling behind the wide collar of his coat.

“Let’s just get started,” said Sakura bad-temperedly, and Muta let her get away with that too.

Once a week, Sakura babysat for Minako, played ninja with whatever cousins (and sometimes whichever neighborhood kids) showed up, and challenged (or was challenged by) Ino to a competition as best rivals. Occasionally, there were book fair committee meetings to attend too. No one had quite worked up the will to ask her what she was doing there, and Sakura, intent on avoiding clean up duties, attended them religiously.

And in her copious free time, which most often seemed to fall on Sundays, Sakura quietly researched compulsion techniques – how to set, break, reverse, and rehab them – in the medical section of the main library. She was slowly but surely making progress there too, although she had to be careful to disguise her true point of interest with extraneous research into adjacent matters.

Maybe it was because she had Uchiha on the mind, but Sakura found the materials on breaking, reversing, and treating various methods of genjutsu torture to be _fascinating._ None of it applied specifically to the sharingan, of course, but she had enough experience, both first and second-hand, to extrapolate. And of course, any medical text written by her shisho was an old favorite, lovingly revisited.

Sakura was thinking about the medical treatise that she had recently read and going through the associated chakra exercises internally when Daikoku-sensei snapped, “Haruno! Did you do the reading?”

“Yes, sensei,” lied Sakura.

“Then you won’t mind demonstrating the genjutsu release to the class,” he sneered, setting off a flurry of nervous titters. “Get up here!”

“Yes, sensei,” said Sakura, as she rose from her seat.

Standing at the front of the class, Sakura allowed her teacher to cast a low level genjutsu on her. She let it settle over her, barely feeling it as his chakra inserted itself into the flow of her own.

_He’s good at that,_ Sakura thought, watching with interest as the class faded from her senses and a large mirror of all things appeared.

Looking into it, Sakura saw _herself,_ but as she ought to be – seventeen and wearing a chuunin’s vest with her family, friends, and comrades standing around her. All of her relatives were there – everyone that had died in the Sand-Sound Invasion or fled the village in the aftermath – as well as Captain Yamato, Shizune, Sasuke, and Naruto. Kakashi-sensei’s nose was buried in his dirty book, but Sakura knew from the slant of his eye that he was happy.

As she watched, Tsunade slung an arm around her neck and hauled her in close for an awkward sideways hug, as she sometimes had when she was really, incredibly, _blindingly_ drunk. Sakura’s family laughed, and Ino jumped on her back, hooking her chin over Sakura’s other shoulder. She smiled, her cheek bunching against Sakura’s own smiling face. And overhead, there were fireworks, brilliant splashes of red and blue and green and white lighting up the sky behind her important people.

“Kai!” Sakura snapped, flexing her chakra against the genjutsu before Sai could do whatever endearing thing he was about to do with that ink-lion. Around her, the illusion shattered, leaving Sakura gasping in front of thirty academy students. Whirling on Daikoku-sensei, she snapped, “What was that?”

“Your fondest wish,” said the teacher levelly. Unexpectedly, he smiled. “You threw it off much more quickly than I expected. And you used the more advanced technique from the assigned reading too. Very good, Haruno.”

“Thank you, sensei,” managed Sakura, her voice strangled, before sloping back to her seat next to Ino.

Her fondest wish wasn’t exactly a surprise to her, and it hadn’t been true even before Itachi’s seal tossed her backwards in time, but Sakura brooded on it all the same. Her family had either died or left the village before Sakura got her apprenticeship with Tsunade. As far as she knew, they had never even met any of her teammates – not even Team Seven from before it imploded. And Sakura had _never_ seen all of her comrades happy at the same time. But she found that she wanted it all the same. She wanted it all so much that it made her heart hurt.

Sakura regretted allowing Daikoku-sensei to snare her in his genjutsu.

At lunchtime, Ino bumped Sakura with her shoulder, saying, “You’re not still sulking over whatever you saw in that genjutsu, are you?”

“No,” lied Sakura, and then smiled when Ino leveled her with a very flat stare. “Come on. If we don’t remind him, Shikamaru might think it’s too bothersome to eat lunch.”

Ino scowled, but she let herself be diverted.

“He’s so lazy! He needs to pay attention more!” complained Ino. She poked Sakura in the side, making her yelp. “And so do you! I saw you staring at Sasuke!”

“I wasn’t staring at Sasuke!”

“You stare at him all the time! Not even a cloak of invisibility could hide _your_ crush!”

Sakura flushed hot, despite herself.

_Stupid Itachi,_ she thought furiously. Aloud she said fiercely, “I do _not_ have a crush on him!”

He was _literally_ twelve. Sakura shuddered at the mere thought of it.

“I like him too,” said Ino challengingly, startling Sakura. Ino’s little face was fierce.

“Ino… you shouldn’t say things like that,” said Sakura weakly. “He’s not worth it.”

“Because you like him too? Do you want him all to yourself, Sakura?”

_Because he’s a traitor,_ Sakura thought coldly. _He’d abandon his comrades and go off with anyone if they promised him power. Sasuke is worse than scum and you deserve better._

“I _don’t_ like him, Ino,” Sakura firmly repeated. “I just find the shape of his hair very soothing to look at when I’m thinking, especially when I’m thinking about trees. If Shikamaru sat in front of us, I’d probably be staring at the back of his spiky hair instead of Sasuke’s. It looks almost like a palm tree, don’t you think?”

Ino stared at Sakura for a moment, her expression so nonplussed that it was actually blank, and then she began to laugh. She was still laughing when they caught up to Shikamaru and Choji.

“I didn’t think it was _that_ funny,” said Sakura grumpily.

“Can you imagine what Shikamaru would do if you did that?” demanded Ino, and Shikamaru shot them both a suspicious look.

“Sleep?” guessed Sakura.

“With the way you stare?” scoffed Ino. “Who could sleep?”

“Man, that would be so troublesome,” pronounced Shikamaru, which made Sakura laugh too.

After lunch, they had range time and then taijutsu class, fighting matches against each other in the arena used for the chuunin exams.

If Sakura had ever bothered to think about it – or him – at all beyond Itachi’s throbbing compulsion to (stare at him incessantly and) keep him alive, she might have assumed that Sasuke would have liked her better this time around.

At eleven, she had been hopelessly infatuated with him. Her weapons skills had improved dramatically across her last year at school, thanks mainly to her rivalry with Ino, but her taijutsu skills had remained deplorable until Tsunade took her on as her apprentice. When they had been genin on the same team, Sasuke had disliked her because she was weak – too weak to be a worthwhile challenge to him.

The years between sixteen and eleven weren’t many, but Sakura was now the best ninja in their class.

And tiny Sasuke _hated_ her for it.

While Ino fought Sakura’s sudden superiority tooth and nail, Sasuke seemed to content to concentrate his efforts on hating Sakura to death. Sakura was happy to report that, as of his crushing defeat in taijutsu class that afternoon, Sasuke had yet to actually manage it. His groundbreaking work in that area, however, continued.

He was _still_ glaring at her in fact, the pupils in his dark eyes trembling, when Sakura left for her training module at the hospital. In fact, he followed her all the way there – moving as subtly as any pre-genin could, which wasn’t very – apparently for the sole purpose of glaring at her _more._

Sakura was amused.

Sasuke was gone by the time that her module let out, however, freeing Sakura up to pursue her newest interest: tree poking.

Ever since Daikoku-sensei had begun teaching them the substitution technique, Sakura had been poking at the Shodai’s trees, examining them with her chakra as well as her five senses. She was currently comparing and contrasting them against the more natural trees that grew throughout Konohagakure. On her way home, Sakura stopped several times to thread her chakra into various trees. In fact, she did that a lot over the next few weeks, with and without Sasuke acting as her silent, hateful shadow.

What Sakura discovered was that naturally grown trees in areas heavily populated by chakra users had residual chakra in them. It was a small amount and muddled, but there. Trees in areas heavily populated by civilians, on the other hand, had only the unfocused, natural energy that one could expect to find in any living thing.

A class project with Shikamaru and Kiba netted her the knowledge that the ancient, gnarled trees in the Nara forest hummed with chakra, all of it bearing the characteristic marks and ratios of the Nara clan. Over the generations, the chakra build up had been such that there was now enough Nara chakra in those trees to confuse a mid-level sensor nin.

And trees grown by the Shodai, Sakura discovered, _blazed_ with what must have been the Shodai’s chakra. All of it – both the chakra and the natural energy – was carefully molded and, like the entire Nara forest, enough to confuse a mid-level sensor ninja. Chakra leak in the ninja districts, as well as the Uzushio Quarter, had only strengthened the molded chakra matrixes within the trees. That was why the Shodai’s trees were larger, stronger, and healthier in the vicinity of frequent chakra users than elsewhere in the village.

Konohagakure’s founder had been _brilliant…_ and shockingly duplicitous.

_I knew it! I knew it! I knew it!_ Sakura thought triumphantly every time a new data point supported her previous hypotheses. _I **knew** it!_

Sakura was nearly bouncing with glee.

She was impressed, of course, with the village’s first Hokage, but even better than that, was the knowledge that _she had been right about **everything.**_ Or at least, everything related to the Shodai’s trees. (She had made some pretty shocking errors in judgment as a member of Konohagakure’s then infamous Team Seven. But no one needed to know about that, because time travel.)

But even more amazing than that was the delicate balance of elements inherent to the Shodai’s jutsu. The careful blending of yin or yang release within chakra natures, the enhancement of the tree’s native natural energy, the use of medical jutsu to improve the tree’s structure and make it grow to its greatest size, and the absolutely exquisite chakra control needed to execute it all simultaneously and to the desired effect… Sakura shuddered at the complexity, at the sheer craftsmanship inherent to the tree beneath her hand. It was enough to get a girl… flustered.

Well, it was if that girl was Haruno Sakura.

It was _embarrassing_ how hot and bothered the Shodai’s handiwork got her. It was her crush on Sasuke all over again, but this time on a dead man… who happened to be her beloved master’s beloved _grandfather_ and the founder of their village.

_My collection of highly inappropriate crushes,_ Sakura thought, despairing. _Let me show them to you._

At least he had never knocked her unconscious and defected from the Leaf or tried to murder their comrade. And he was too dead – and her shisho currently too gone – for her to make a fool out of herself in front of either of them. So, you know, she was already doing better than last time.

Sakura wondered what Captain Yamato’s Mokuton trees would feel like. Were they as carefully crafted as the Shodai’s had been or the product of vast amounts of hit and miss until he had found the right balance, as so many ninja techniques were? It was a line of speculation that led her to some interesting places, theory-wise.

But she never, ever, under any circumstances would have tried to _replicate_ the Shodai’s jutsu.

It was her teachers at the academy that made her do it.

If they had been just a little less boring and their classroom exercises just a little more interesting, she wouldn’t have spent twenty minutes evaluating her skills as a medical ninja against the Shodai’s obvious skills as a medic nin, found herself lacking, and then made a list of the areas in which she needed to improve. She wasn’t going to let that guy defeat her, not as a medic nin.

Sakura only wasted two hours looking up incredibly advanced and highly exoteric chakra control exercises in the medical library and memorizing them, because she needed things to do in class. Her control, thankfully, had followed her to this new, little body, but it was an ingrained habit to work at refining it whenever she wasn’t fully engaged. And there was absolutely nothing engaging about the pre-genin syllabus. It definitely wasn’t an attempt to make her work as exquisite as the Shodai’s. That would be crazy and a waste of time, two things that she couldn’t afford.

She worked on shaping the water component while soaking in the bath – rather than simply diverting her excess chakra into her Strength of One Hundred Seal, as she usually did at the end of the day – because it was fun. And as long as the chakra all got used, her chakra pathways would continue to increase.

And it was a good way to improve her skill with water jutsu. Water _was_ one of her elements, after all… as was earth. If Sakura could have thought of a discreet way to work on that too, she would have.

Senjutsu, on the other hand, proved to be a more fruitful area of improvement. Sakura knew just enough about senjutsu from her master – and then her subsequent practical applications of the information, something that had ultimately resulted in the creation of her Medical Pills – to have a basic understanding of what he had done there. She just needed to get the manipulations, chakra ratios, and timing right and then… if the Shodai’s techniques were hidden rather than a bloodline limit, if she could teach herself the things that she needed to know, if she could replicate his work, if she could just _do_ this, then… _then…_

_Then maybe I’ll grow a tree,_ thought Sakura, feeling flush with unexpected hope. If anyone in this world was suited to replicating Shodai’s lost technique, it was her.

And Sakura found that she was certainly willing to give it a try… but only to make the classroom hours go faster.

 

 

 

Aside from herself, Sakura had never seen anyone at Ino’s birthday parties that wasn’t a Yamanaka, Akimichi, or Nara. It had been obvious even to her, even at that age, that she didn’t belong, and not even all of Ino’s fierce assurances that she was wanted there could change that. She had been the only pink-haired person in the entire room, something that had made her feel even more self-conscious under all those assessing shinobi gazes. Looking back on things, it had been good practice for when she was the only pink-haired person in the entire village.

In the present, Sakura was the only pink-haired person at Shikamaru’s birthday party. This time, she pretended not to notice.

“Here,” she said to Shikamaru, offering to him a large dark blue envelope decorated with shooting stars and crescent moons. “I made it myself. I hope you like it.”

Shikamaru opened his mouth to say something, glanced at the looming presence that was his mother, and sighed.

“Thank you,” he said unenthusiastically. “I appreciate it.”

“Try to sound a little more sincere the next time you say that,” she advised, laughing. Glancing away for a moment to gather her thoughts, Sakura looked back at Shikamaru’s youthful face and said, “It’s not a shogi set or anything like that, but I thought it might be useful next year, when we’re real ninja.”

Interest sharpened Shikamaru’s expression.

“Thank you,” he repeated, and his fingers flexed around her gift, making the envelope crinkle loudly. He was trying to feel for what was in the envelope.

Smiling, Sakura inclined her head and slipped past Shikamaru and his mom, heading further down the porch to where Shikamaru’s dad was already drinking with Ino and Choji’s dads as well as a smattering of other adults from their respective clans.

It was still early in the afternoon, but several of the adults were already pink in the face, including Ino and Shikamaru’s dads – the heads of ANBU’s Intelligence and ANBU Assassinations Departments respectively. Sakura found that _very_ reassuring.

That sliver of Itachi at the back of her brain remained crazy and unreasonable.

Sakura ignored it as best she could.

“Sakura!” called Ino, while waving her over to the corner where she and Choji were playing cards with some of the cousins, and Sakura moved to join them.

When she was actually a child, having the brightest hair in the room had discomforted her. Now, it made Sakura feel… valued. Wanted, really, since there still wasn’t anything noticeably special about her; she was from a family of hopeless civilians, not one of which had ever graduated from any ninja academy anywhere, ever. She didn’t know anyone important, and she wasn’t apprenticed to anyone important yet.

She _was_ currently ranked first in the class, but that was coming out of the summer term. It didn’t mean much yet, since the last year was the year in which academy students learned all their ninjutsu and genjutsu skills. If Sakura managed to hold onto her lead across the fall term – thirteen weeks total, although there were only six weeks left in it now – then it might be worth noticing.

Nothing but the purest of friendships had gotten her through the front door, and this time she knew it.

The party moved at a swift pace after that. The ninja children played ninja games, there were snacks on a side table, and the adults gossiped, something that Sakura listened to with half an ear. Shikamaru’s mom brought out cake and ice cream, Shikamaru was duly sung to, and everyone enjoyed their share of the sweets before Sakura was gently encouraged to leave.

That, Sakura knew, was because they were saving the clan matters for when there were only clan ears listening. And as the evening wore on – and everyone got drunker – there would be wandering Yamanaka minds and slithering Nara shadows to contend with. Of the three clans, only the Akimichi became less dangerous when drunk.

Taking the hint, Sakura thanked Shikamaru for inviting her, waved goodbye to the others, and left. It was only mid-afternoon, so Sakura had plenty of time to meander home – she was too full of cake and ice cream to run anywhere – and change before going downstairs to visit her parents.

Sakura’s parents ran a bookkeeping business. They kept books for several businesses in the Uzushio Quarter. Her parents didn’t usually work on weekends, but the quarterly tax was coming up, and everyone was scrambling to come up with what they owed the village.

The money that the village took in from its cut of missions paid for basic infrastructure, the shinobi academy, the hospital, and the like, although a part of it also went into the village’s war chest. Shinobi villages were always preparing for the next great shinobi war. At one time, civilian taxes had supported the village’s police force, jails, and the detainment center, but after the Uchiha Massacre what remained of the village’s police force had been disbanded and the police functions, jails, and detainment center had been shifted to ANBU’s purview – and the village’s tab.

Nowadays, taxes on civilians and businesses were supposed to support things like the village’s orphanage, the widows and families fund, various business and community growth funds, and the disaster recovery chest, although they could be allocated to things like the hospital or village defense during times of war, stress, or unrest.

Considering what ROOT was doing to the village’s orphans and how the recovery had gone after the Sand-Sound Invasion, Sakura wondered what the point was. It seemed obvious in retrospect that the village’s leaders were using the civilians’ taxes to fund their illicit projects. And in the wake of the invasion, it had become painfully obvious that only a fraction of the funds had ever ended up at their intended destinations.

_The civilians need a Civilian Council,_ Sakura thought as she ran down the stairs, _to protect their interests._

It would never happen, of course, because there was too much money at stake, but she liked to think about it. Her parents didn’t pay taxes to support Danzo’s private army, and they had deserved better than to be left to save themselves during the Sand-Sound Invasion.

Sandaime had been a great shinobi, but he was aloof from his civilian population. He hadn’t care for them or even appreciated where his food, clothing, and quarterly influx of revenues came from, and the village had suffered for it after the Sand-Sound Invasion. When every Uzushio not currently under contract to the village had left, they had taken with them their skills, labor, progeny, and potential future revenues. It had made recovery from the attack harder, and the village had consequently been smaller and weaker in the aftermath than it had been before it.

Sakura hadn’t been the only one to miss the Uzushio. Tsunade had missed them fiercely… and angrily. The mistakes of the previous Hokage were inherited by their successor, and as Sandaime’s successor, Tsunade had inherited the consequences of a great many mistakes.

Downstairs, the front room was empty, the sign on the door turned to “Sorry, we’re closed!” Sakura found her parents in the back offices.

When they had opened their business, her parents had divided the back room in two and used seals to soundproof both of them. Separate workspaces, her mother had often said, was the key to a happy marriage. Every client, no matter how small their account, deserved privacy and their full attention when addressing their personal financial concerns, her father had always said, which couldn’t happen in a combined office. It seemed to work for them.

Knocking on first one open door and then the other, Sakura said, “I’m home!”

“Already?” called her father cheerfully. “You weren’t gone very long. I thought you were at a party!”

“I was! And then… it ended.”

“You weren’t the last to leave were you?” demanded her mother, popping her head out of her door. Her arms were full of files. “Sakura, you shouldn’t be the last to leave a party.”

Sakura laughed. “I was the first.”

“You shouldn’t be the first either!” exclaimed her father, appearing at the door to his office. “Then they’ll think that you weren’t having fun.” His eyes widened. _“Were_ you having fun?”

“Yes,” said Sakura, with a quick smile. “But I was the only person there who wasn’t part of the Nara, Akimichi, or Yamanaka clans. Shikamaru liked having me there – I think – but they wanted me to go so that they could talk about clan business. They’re all part of the same compact, you know.”

Her mother’s lips briefly thinned. Her father’s eyes widened.

“No,” said her mother tightly. “I didn’t know.”

“So it’s kind of a big deal that you were invited at all?” asked her father slowly.

“Not really,” said Sakura. She shrugged. “It might be important, if I was the First Head of the Haruno ninja clan, but I’m not. Since I’m just his friend from the academy, it just means that Shikamaru considers me a close friend. That’s all. It was probably just reciprocity for inviting him to the annual celebration. He had a really good time playing shogi with one of the shogi masters. And he loved the living shogi match.”

Sakura watched as her parents both relaxed.

“That’s good,” said her mother. “I’m glad that he had such a good time.”

“Really good!” agreed her father brightly. “Was there dancing?”

Sakura laughed. “At a Nara event? They’re way too lazy! But it was nice! There were games. And the cake was really good! I think they got it at one of the Akimichi bakeries.”

“I’m glad that you had fun,” said her mother more sincerely, and her father nodded.

“It’s Ino’s birthday tomorrow, isn’t it?” asked her father. “You always have fun at that.”

“It is! And I do!” Sakura smiled. “But I came down here for a reason. I know that you’ve got to work late tonight, so I thought that I could make dinner – if you like.”

Her parents exchanged a quick, panicked look. Seeing it, Sakura pouted. She knew what that look meant. She wasn’t _that_ bad of a cook!

“We were thinking of getting takeout tonight,” said her father diplomatically, “as a treat. Why don’t you go pick us up something from… somewhere?”

“Miyori’s,” said her mother immediately. “I love their spring rolls.”

“Oh!” exclaimed her father, looking delighted. He clapped his hands together. “And their udon!”

“Alright,” said Sakura. “I’ll go to Miyori’s. If I go now, I might get there before the dinner rush. Here, let me write it down for them.”

Miyori’s made the cutest food that Sakura had ever seen anywhere, but it was all really tasty. It was late in the day, so all of the restaurant’s sweets would already be gone, but everything else would be made to order. Accepting money from her father, Sakura ran all the way to the restaurant.

When Sakura arrived at Miyori, Fumito was behind the counter. Sakura could just glimpse his wife, Megumi, through the pass through from the kitchen. At the table sat a little girl with her mother’s brown hair and her father’s blue eyes. That little girl’s name was Miyori, and she was the person that her parents had named their restaurant for.

“Hello!” called Sakura, as she came through the door. “I’ve been sent to get dinner!”

“Are your parents working late then?” asked Fumito sympathetically.

“Yes,” said Sakura, as she passed him a cloth bag and the paper that she had written her family’s order on. “It’s that time of year again.”

Fumito nodded, and they talked pleasantly for awhile. Megumi was a civilian from a long line of Leaf civilians, but Fumito had been a toddler carried out of Uzushiogakure by one of the other refugee groups. Word had it that Fumito had been rejected by the Shinobi Academy, so his requirement had passed to his firstborn – and so far only, child – Miyori. At six, Miyori had just started at the academy, and Sakura gave her tips for how to succeed with the first year teachers.

“If you want to rank well in your classes,” Sakura said, “then you’re going to have to work harder and be smarter than any of the clan kids. It’s hard, but you can do it.” Little Miyori nodded seriously and, on a whim, Sakura said, “I could check your homework if you like?”

So she looked over Miyori’s assignments and, since the restaurant was currently empty, helped the younger girl with her taijutsu stances.

“I know that Akira-sensei showed it to you like this,” Sakura said, as she gently modified Miyori’s stance, “but he’s a man. To be as strong as him, you would have to use chakra to enhance your body, and his center of gravity is all different from ours anyway. Do it like this, okay? It’ll be easier on you, but it’ll give you the same results.”

Miyori chewed her lower lip. “Won’t he be mad at me for doing it differently than he taught me?”

Sakura laughed, because she would have asked the same thing her first time through too.

“No. The kunoichi from clan families are getting tips like this from their parents. He’ll just be surprised that anyone told you.”

Miyori scowled. “But that’s not fair!”

“No,” Sakura agreed. “It’s not. But there’s not a lot about being a ninja that is fair, so I guess the academy is good practice for that at least. Pay attention to the chakra exercises, especially the one where you stick leaves to your forehead. They’ll help you with your sealing when you get older.”

Miyori nodded seriously.

“Sakura-chan,” called Fumito. “Your order is ready.”

Turning back to the man, Sakura watched as he carefully stacked colorful cardboard boxes into her cloth bag. On top of her order, he added a little partitioned box.

“That’s not mine,” said Sakura immediately. “I didn’t even know that you had any left.”

“Just a few,” said Fumito. “As a thank you.” And he winked at her.

Sakura grinned back. “Thank _you!”_

Paying, she took her bag and left the shop with a last little wave to Miyori and her father.

Carrying takeout meant that Sakura couldn’t run. For the first time since she had woken up in her younger body, she crossed paths with Captain Yamato at the main road without first knocking into him. As always, the sight of him alive and not currently on fire brightened her mood.

Deliberately stepping into his path, Sakura said cheerfully, “Hey, it’s you again!”

Tiredly, Yamato blinked down at her. He had a slightly singed pack on his back and a bloodied bandage around his left thigh and another around his left bicep. He looked stressed and… sad.

Captain Yamato never looked sad. When he was sober, he never looked much of anything except serious, mildly amused, and wildly frustrated with his subordinates’ stupidity, and Sakura suspected that the last only made an appearance around the members of Team Seven. They just tended to have that effect on people.

“Here,” said Sakura, and on impulse, she pulled the cardboard box of sweets from her takeout. Presenting it to him with one hand, she said, “This is for you.”

Captain Yamato’s eyes widened. “I don’t understand,” he said warily.

“You look sad. So maybe this will cheer you up?”

Captain Yamato now looked bemused, which was an improvement in Sakura’s estimate of affairs.

“Thank you?” he offered, still wary and unsure.

As Sakura passed him the box, a familiar form appeared at Captain Yamato’s side. Slinging an arm around Captain Yamato’s shoulders, he slouched close saying, “What’s this? A love gift? You’ll share with your poor old senpai, won’t you, Tenzo?”

Sakura could practically see the effort that it cost Captain Yamato not to roll his eyes at Kakashi. Biting back her laughter, she waved at them both saying, “Well, I’m off! I can’t let dinner get cold! Bye!”

She left before anyone could ask any uncomfortable questions, her amusement following her all the way home.

 

 

 

Shikamaru and Ino had been born only a day apart, and that year, Shikamaru’s birthday had fallen on a Saturday, Ino’s on a Sunday.

Ino’s birthday party would probably have many of the same people at it, but Sakura knew from experience that the atmosphere would be entirely different. Aside from anything else, Ino always had her birthdays in the greenhouse with all the non-poisonous flowers. Walking up the path to the designated greenhouse, Sakura could already hear boisterous laughter and the clink of glasses. Through one of the windows, Choji waved at her, and smiling, Sakura waved back at him.

Ino was hovering by the greenhouse’s door, happily greeting her guests without the looming threat of adult censure to force her good behavior. Ino loved hosting.

It was odd.

Sakura had been coming to Ino’s birthday parties for years, but looking back on it, no one had ever paid much attention to her before. Even at Shikamaru’s birthday party yesterday, no one except Ino, Choji, and sometimes Shikamaru had paid any attention to her. Now, it felt different.

The volume of the parry hadn’t changed, and no one was looking directly at her save Ino, but Sakura still had the impression that she was being observed from every angle. It made the fine hairs at the back of Sakura’s neck prickle… as well as her instincts as a shinobi.

The sliver of Itachi at the back of her brain wailed to life, and Inner Sakura was on it in the next instant, her iron fists of fury beating back the tides of Itachi’s crazy paranoia. If Itachi had ever successfully completed any infiltration work at all – ever – Sakura would eat her boots. If she still had boots, that is.

Sakura told herself that she was being ridiculous.

She didn’t really believe it though.

Forcing a smile, Sakura thanked Ino for inviting her and surrendered her birthday gift unto the birthday girl. Ino practically snatched it out of her hands and squeezed it, the pink envelope crinkling under her fingers. Her face lit up, and she crowed, “Yes! I got one too!”

“It could be something different,” said Sakura, amused. “It could be a very large tube of toothpaste.”

The disbelieving look Ino fixed her with made Sakura laugh.

“Although it’s probably not,” Sakura conceded, and then laughed again when Ino stuck her tongue out at her.

“Come on,” said Ino, grabbing Sakura’s hand with her free hand. “I’ll show you where to go.”

That was new. Ino had never worried overmuch about where Sakura went or who she talked to at her birthday parties, as long no one was unkind to her. Now, Ino planted Sakura beneath a half-grown hybrid, right between Shikamaru and Choji. They were cloud watching. Sakura bit back a smile.

“Stay here,” order Ino, then fluttered off to see to her other guests. She still had Sakura’s gift clutched in hand. In fact, Sakura watched as Ino bypassed the presents table entirely, holding onto her gift as she laughed at something one of her aunts said.

That was strange too.

Turning her attention to her companions, Sakura said, “How’s it going?”

“Good,” said Choji around a mouthful of chips. When he offered the bag to Sakura, she politely took one.

“Mmmm, barbecue,” she said, and Choji grinned.

“My mom’s being troublesome about that storage scroll you gave me,” sighed Shikamaru. “She said it was too much.”

“Too much?” asked Sakura, confused.

“Too expensive,” explained Shikamaru.

“I told you, I made it myself,” said Sakura, “so it only cost me the price of the actual scroll I used. I didn’t even have to buy the inks, because I still had some left over from making Ino’s.”

Shikamaru slanted a sideways look. “You _did_ say that, didn’t you?”

“You made Shikamaru’s sealing scroll?” asked Choji from her other side. He sounded impressed. “Iruka-sensei said that those are really hard to make.”

Sakura shrugged. “It wasn’t that bad. He’s just not very good at sealing. It would’ve gone quicker if I had larger chakra stores though.”

“You should tell my mom that,” said Shikamaru gloomily. “Maybe she would relax – as much as she ever does.”

Reaching into his kunai pouch, he produced the storage scroll that Sakura had made for him, still bound by the black ribbon that Sakura had looped around it. The bow was much sloppier now.

“My parents showed me how to use it,” said Shikamaru, as he unrolled the scroll. Sakura saw a glimpse of the front of the scroll – ‘shogi set’ and ‘chips’ had already been sealed into it – before he flipped it over. “But we couldn’t figure out what the dots on the back were for.”

“They’re to protect the scroll,” said Sakura. Tapping each dot in turn, she said, “That’s to strengthen it against bending and tearing. That’s to protect against wind. That’s for dirt. And that’s for water. You can’t take it swimming or use it during a storm, but a light sprinkling of rain won’t destroy it.”

They were the same seals that Uzushio used on the slips that they printed their wishes on before attaching them to the prayer ropes.

Shikamaru groaned. “Oh, man. That probably makes the scroll even more valuable. My mom is never going to stop freaking out.”

Tapping the blank spot beneath the dots, Sakura said conciliatorily, “I still haven’t figured out how to protect it from burning. And it’ll still get worn out over time.”

“That’s not going to make my mom feel better.”

“I didn’t mean to get you in trouble,” said Sakura coolly, drawing away from Shikamaru.

After studying her for a long moment, Shikamaru made a face.

“I’m not ungrateful,” he said, “and for what it’s worth, I like it. It’s useful. But between clans, expensive gifts like storage scrolls have meanings. It means more because you gave it to Ino and me.”

“Oh,” said Sakura, equal parts bemused and annoyed. She was always finding out about things like this after she had already misstepped or expected too little or been mortally insulted without knowing it. Shikamaru was _twelve,_ and he still knew more about inter-clan politics than she did.

“But I’m not part of a ninja clan,” said Sakura.

“But you could be,” said Shikamaru. “You could want to marry into one.”

_His?_ Sakura wondered, and grimaced. She didn’t want to marry Shikamaru. She hadn’t wanted to marry anyone, since her crush on Sasuke had exploded in her face.

“Well, my mom is thinking of it like that,” said Shikamaru as he looped the ribbon around his scroll again.

“What about your dad?”

“I dunno,” said Shikamaru. “He was sick this morning.”

He was hungover, although Sakura kept that insight to herself.

“Or you could start your own,” said Choji bracingly. When she and Shikamaru looked over at him, he shrugged, saying, “My dad is the Fifteenth Head of the Akimichi Clan. That means fifteen generations ago, there must have been a _First_ Head of the Akimichi Clan.”

“I… hadn’t thought of it like that,” said Sakura slowly. It was better than anyone thinking that she wanted to marry into Shikamaru’s clan, at least.

_I wonder which theory Ino believes,_ thought Sakura, and then reflexively looked over to where Ino and her father were moving between their guests. They fluttered between them like a butterflies tending their garden. Ino was still carrying Sakura’s gift with her, its paper wrappings crumpled beneath her fingers. That… probably meant something, maybe even something important.

_Stupid clan politics,_ thought Sakura, not for the first time.

When all of the guests had arrived, Ino delicately chivvied her guests through the party activities, ruling everyone under the age of seventeen as thoroughly as any princess with a tiara on her brow. In short order, Sakura was fed cake and ice cream and ushered out the door.

On her way home, Sakura picked up takeout for her family.

“How was your party?” asked Sakura’s father over dinner. “Fun?”

“Yes,” said Sakura. She frowned down at her bowl of miso soup. “And it was weird. I gave Ino and Shikamaru sealed objects for their birthdays, and their clans made a whole big deal out of it.”

“What kind of sealed objects?” demanded her mother crisply. “It wasn’t anything embarrassing, was it?”

“No, I gave them storage scrolls,” said Sakura. “They worked and everything.”

Her parents, at least, were _delighted._

“Our little sealing master!” cried her father, and Sakura grinned.

“Not yet,” Sakura disagreed. “I’m more like a sealing genin, I think.”

“It’s good, steady work in a ninja village,” said her mother, beaming. “And it’s lucrative too. Do you know how much storage scrolls go for?”

“No,” admitted Sakura.

“We’ll go price some out next weekend,” promised her mother, even though it was one of their busy times, and her father was so happy that he didn’t even protest.

Sakura beamed. At least someone was happy about her skill with seals.

 

 

 

The Sarutobi found her at lunch the next day. Inviting himself to have a seat on her blanket, he smiled at Sakura. She suspected that it was meant to be flirtatious.

A term ahead of her at the academy, Sarutobi Haru had always seemed nice enough, but he had never paid much attention to her, not even when she had been Tsunade’s apprentice. Sakura had always been under the impression that, while he respected her abilities and position in the village, he hadn’t particularly liked her personally.

Now, he was downright solicitous, leaning towards her and hanging on her every bland word.

“It must be hard for you, being a first generation ninja.”

“I get by.”

“Yeah, but it’s easier to get by with a little help from your friends,” said Haru, and then smiled another of those flirtatious smiles. In another few years, it would make his face handsome. Now, it just made Sakura uncomfortable. No one deserved to be flirted with by a twelve year old.

“Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji are great friends,” agreed Sakura, and glanced over to where the others were making their way towards her. Shikamaru looked as laidback and unbothered as ever, but Choji looked vaguely anxious. Ino was scowling.

“You have more friends than that,” said Haru, leaning nearer. Too near, in Sakura’s opinion.

_Cocky brat,_ thought Sakura, and smiled sweetly.

“Tell you what,” offered Haru, his hand landing on Sakura’s shoulder. “I’ll help you with the basic three and your chakra control if you’ll give me a storage scroll too.”

Sakura threw her head back and laughed, bright and loud and sparkling. She couldn’t help it. He was just so _cute._

And then she punched him face first into the ground.

“You’re a _terrible_ friend,” Sakura said bluntly to his prone form, “and you’re a worse ninja. You didn’t even bother to do a speck of research on your mark, did you?”

“What’s there to research?” spat Haru, as he levered himself up. “You’re just a civilian.”

“One who beat your ass.”

“I wasn’t expecting it!”

“Then you’re even more pathetic than I thought,” sneered Sakura, and Haru scowled at her darkly.

“Sakura’s already in a medic nin program,” said Ino from behind Haru, and Sakura watched with interest as the Sarutobi stiffened. “She doesn’t need _you_ to help her with chakra control.”

“Or your training,” said Sakura. “I’m first in my class at the academy – unlike you.”

“My great uncle is the Hokage!”

“Which says nothing about you,” snapped Ino. “Except that you don’t have any of your own accomplishments to brag about.”

“Perhaps I should ask Hokage-sama if it’s really his will that I make you a storage scroll for free,” asked Sakura, and watched with interest as Haru paled. “That’s what I thought,” said Sakura with satisfaction. “He doesn’t like it when you throw his name around, does he?”

“Shut up!”

“Or what?” sneered Sakura. “You’ll tell your great uncle on me?”

The fight was very short.

“Troublesome,” pronounced Shikamaru as they watched Haru storm away.

“Your cousins are such gossips!” complained Ino.

“So are yours,” said Shikamaru, and Ino scowled.

“It could have been one of my cousins,” offered Choji, trying to smooth things over between them.

Sakura suspected that it had been all of the above, but rather than saying that, she merely said, “It doesn’t matter. If they want a storage scroll, they can buy it off of me like anyone else.”

“You’re selling them?” asked Ino, surprised.

“No,” said Sakura, “but Shikamaru says that they’re expensive. No one is going to seriously scrape up that kind of money to pay a pre-genin for a storage scroll that they could buy off a known supplier instead. It’ll be fine.”

Probably.

Sarutobi Haru may have been the first of Sakura’s school mates to try to trick, charm, or bully Sakura out of a sealing scroll, but he wasn’t the last. It certainly made the term more interesting.

 

 

 

“Your friend was in here earlier,” said Fumito casually, as he boxed up Sakura’s order a few weeks later.

“My friend?” asked Sakura, surprised. The little restaurant was really far away from all the ninja districts. “Ino?”

“No, another one,” said Fumito. “He was older and a full ninja. Dark hair, dark eyes, kind of a square face?”

_Captain Yamato?_ Sakura wondered, and shrugged, saying, “That could be a lot of people.”

“But no one who comes to mind immediately,” guessed Fumito. “Don’t worry. I didn’t say anything about you.”

“Thanks!”

The man winked. “There are a lot of pink-haired girls in our district,” he said, and Sakura smiled.

“There are, aren’t there?” she said happily. Sakura wondered if she could persuade any of them to stay this time around.

As she ran out of the restaurant and down the street, her second shadow abandoned the clothing shop that he had been loitering in to chase after her.

Sakura frowned.

It had been amusing at first, but now it was beginning to be annoying. If he kept it up, she was going to have to ask him what he wanted, and Sakura didn’t want to have to do that.

It was bad enough that she had to protect him and occasionally slip food into his fridge. Talking to him, thinking about him, thinking about _Team Seven_ was asking too much of her. It had been months since Sakura was killed by the older, somehow crazier Uchiha brother and flung into her past, and in all that time, Sakura had avoided thinking too hard about Team Kakashi’s original members.

They hadn’t exactly parted on the best of terms.

Sasuke had blithely deserted the Leaf for the mere promise of power, knocking her out and shoving two chidori through Naruto’s chest while he was about it. Half of their year mates had nearly died trying to bring him home. Two and a half years later, he had kicked the crap out of her teammates then given his body to Orochimaru in exchange for the promise of even more power.

But something must have gone wrong with the technique – or very right, Tsunade had said, because it would have explained a lot about what Orochimaru had become in his later years – because the two of them had ended up blended together. The thing that they had become had been neither of them. Worse, he had somehow been crazier, more mercurial, and less empathetic than either had been individually. It had been a tossup as to who had taken that development worse: Itachi or Naruto.

Naruto had already nearly killed her twice over Sasuke – not counting that time on the hospital’s roof. And Sakura wasn’t sure – she’d been busy first not dying, and then getting kidnapped by deranged Akatsuki members – but she didn’t think much of anything had survived Naruto’s meltdown over Sasuke’s death.

An out of control Naruto was a _disaster._

Between them, Sasuke, Naruto, and Orochimaru had done what three great shinobi wars and the fall of Uzushiogakure hadn’t managed to do: they had destroyed the Village Hidden in the Leaves.

At the end of everything – well, _her_ everything, Kakashi had probably outlived her – things with Kakashi had been… fine. Probably. She had been his favorite medic in the village… which, honestly, hadn’t been saying much. Unfortunately, it was all that she could honestly say about what had lain between them – or rather, what hadn’t lain between them. Sasuke had been his favorite when they were children, Naruto when their team was reformed. She had just been… there; useful, sometimes, perhaps, but seemingly never more than a friendly work acquaintance to Kakashi on even on their friendliest days.

The rejection of it still stung.

It was just easier not to think too much about Uzumaki Naruto, Hatake Kakashi, or Uchiha Sasuke, even if she spent an unreasonable amount of time staring at the back of the last’s head while contemplating jutsu equations.

Except now, Sasuke was _making_ her think about him when she didn’t have to.

Sakura did not appreciate it.

She was not a patient woman by nature, but Sakura _did_ try to wait him out. Two weeks into that, she gave up and flung a couple of practice kunai at him – one where he was to get him moving in the right direction, and the other where he was going to be after he dodged the first – and roared, “Enough already!” Her shout was nearly loud enough drown out Sasuke’s yelp when Sakura’s blunted practice kunai hit him – in the chest, she thought.

Glaring at the bushes, Sakura snapped, “What do you _want?”_

Another beat of silence, then the bush rustled again as Uchiha Sasuke emerged from it, rubbing his chest and scowling at her.

“Train with me,” demanded Sasuke, and Sakura nearly died then and there, ignominiously killed a second time by an Uchiha.

_Damn Uchiha,_ Sakura thought, as she used a wisp of medical jutsu to ease her choking and soothe her throat.

“No,” said Sakura, as soon as she could speak with a level tone. If it came out harsher than she had meant it to, she wasn’t sorry. Sasuke didn’t respond well to niceness anyway. He’d been everyone’s favorite teammate – hers and Naruto’s _and_ Kakashi-sensei’s – and he’d still betrayed them all the first time that someone offered him a shortcut to the power he craved.

If there was one thing that Sakura wasn’t going to do, she absolutely wasn’t going to train a future traitor to the Leaf.

In the present, Sasuke glared at her again before turning on his heel and stalking away with all the furious dignity of an insulted cat. But the next day he was back, stalking her, staring at her, and making the skin on the back of her neck crawl.

Sakura beamed him with another blunted practice kunai. Thanks to stupid Itachi’s stupid compulsion, Sasuke’s pained yelp was even more satisfying than Sakura had expected it to be, which was… odd. Sakura had the impression that the compulsion ought not to have responded like that.

As odd as that moment was, Sakura didn’t have time to untangle it then. Sasuke edged out of his hiding place, already staring at her. Hard. It was just a hypothesis, but Sakura suspected that he was trying to intimidate her.

It reminded her of Sai. He had always studied her like that, and she… missed it. She missed him. Sakura wished that she had bumped into him even once since waking up in her younger self’s body.

“Stop it,” said Sakura, her eyes aching and her face uncomfortably warm. Inner Sakura cursed their fair skin. It was always blushing at the worst possible moment! “You’re making me uncomfortable.”

“You stare at me _all the time_ in class,” retorted Sasuke, sounding disgruntled. He dropped down from the tree that he had been hiding in. “How did you know that I was there?”

_Because I’m a goddamn chuunin, that’s how, you self-important brat,_ thought Sakura irritably. Out loud, she said, “I’m not _staring_ at you. Your head just happens to be in the direction that I like to look in when I’m thinking.”

Sasuke snorted. He crossed his arms, turned on his heel, and left.

The next day, the little shit sat at the back of the class. If Sakura was going to look at him, she was going to have to twist around in her seat to do it.

_Little bastard,_ Sakura thought, annoyed.

She didn’t _have_ to look at him. She just had to check in on him at least a few times a day; a dozen, tops. Watching Sasuke be alive, well, and unthreatened during weapons and taijutsu classes might be enough to satisfy the compulsion that Itachi had set on her. And if not, Sakura knew the best spot to sit in the tree that grew outside of his apartment. From there, she could watch Sasuke’s main room and bedroom at the same time… or feel the flicker and pull of his chakra on the rare nights that Sasuke actually remembered to draw his curtains.

But to stare at Sasuke during weapon and taijutsu class, she actually needed to be near him. And that would require a certain amount of effort on her part.

And so it was with a deeply resentful heart that Sakura beat out a dozen other girls for a position on the same weapons’ range as Sasuke. As she took her place beside him, Sasuke smirked. Sakura narrowed her eyes at him, barely resisting the urge to smack him through the nearest tree. She might have done it anyway, but Itachi’s compulsion distracted her.

Smacking Sasuke – into a tree or at all – would have hurt him, but Itachi’s compulsion didn’t seem to see it that way. It seemed to interpret her heartfelt desire to _hurt_ Sasuke as a heartfelt desire to _improve_ him, and for his own good, no less. It would accept terrible damage to Sasuke as a means to achieving its goal: protecting Sasuke, no matter what.

That…

It was…

It said some really uncomfortable things about Uchiha Itachi… and about the people that had shaped his nindo.

A teacher’s nindo left a mark on their students – unseen, perhaps unfelt, but there all the same. She had been Kakashi’s least favorite student, the one that he had forgotten that he had more often than not, but even she had taken his nindo to heart. She didn’t abandon her teammates. She would protect them. And she would save her comrades’ lives, if she could manage it.

Naruto had believed it too, as well as Sasuke – well, before Itachi had broken his mind, anyway. Even Captain Yamato had believed it, despite saying repeatedly that he hadn’t. He had once made a truce with Kabuto – traitor to the Leaf, apprentice to Orochimaru, and A-class criminal – to save her life after Naruto had lost control of the kyuubi and critically wounded her. As far as Sakura had been able to tell, everyone who had ever spent much time as Kakashi-sensei’s kohai had adopted his nindo to one degree or another.

Lee had wholeheartedly believed in Gai-sensei’s Springtime of Youth, as had Tenten to a much lesser extent. Even Neji had adopted it… after Naruto defeated him in the Chuunin Exams. Ino, Shikamaru, and Choji had adopted Asuma-sensei’s belief in the King, and Kiba, Shino, and Hinata had taken Kurenai-sensei’s nindo as their own.

Sakura had met many, many people who shared Itachi’s nindo. And they had all been students of the same man… Shimura Danzo.

_A link between ROOT and Uchiha Itachi?_ Sakura wondered, her stomach sinking.

It seemed impossible, but if she had learned anything as Tsunade’s apprentice, it was that few things were truly impossible in the ninja world. If there was a link between Danzo’s ROOT organization and Uchiha Itachi, the boy who had murdered his entire clan in a single night to test his strength, then –

“Hey, idiot!” barked Kiba, utterly derailing her train of thought. “Go throw your kunai!”

“Shut up!” shouted Sakura, her fist slamming onto the top of Kiba’s head. “I was thinking!”

“Ow! Jeez! You –”

“Haruno!” shouted Iruka-sensei, interrupting Kiba before he managed to say something that Sakura would have to kick his ass for.

“Sorry, sensei!” chirped Sakura automatically. Stepping up to the throwing line, she took her turn. The kunai that she swiftly tossed at the target all went where she wanted them to go, but Sakura was too out of sorts to enjoy it.

The throws had been too simple to do much to distract her from the suddenly thorny issue of Itachi. Because if Itachi was a ROOT agent, then it meant that there was probably more to the Uchiha Massacre than initially met the eye.

There were few things in this world that Sakura wanted to do less than help that guy.

He had tortured her! And murdered her! And his entire family, save Sasuke, whom he had used genjutsu to torture until he was more than half mad. Uchiha Itachi destroyed everything that he touched.

But… Danzo.

And maybe, possibly Sai.

And village security.

Sakura sighed.

 

 

 

By the end of the fall term, Daikoku-sensei had taught them the hand seals for the Leaf’s simplest bunshin technique, the village’s transformation technique, and the Leaf’s standard replacement technique. None of Sakura’s classmates could perform all three of them yet.

“Remember to practice over the break,” said Daikoku-sensei on the last day of term. In front of him, an entire class of pre-genin is bent over their hands, laboriously twisting their fingers through the list of seals written on the blackboard behind him. “I expect to spend some time helping you to refine your abilities with these techniques next term, but the bulk of the work should be done outside of class.”

As a (secret) chuunin, the assignment was a snap for Sakura. After all, she already knew all three techniques, _and_ she could perform them both instantaneously and without using hand seals.

_But,_ Sakura decided, as she made the hand seals along with everybody else, _the point of training sabbaticals is to train. There’s always room for improvement. My goals – my goals for this training exercise are…_

There, Sakura faltered. The three techniques they were learning, while unglamorous, were the bread and butter of their future trade. How could she possibly improve on them?

_I can’t,_ Sakura decided. _I’ll just have to think of something more creative to do with them. Something that I haven’t done yet._

On the last day of the fall term, Iruka-sensei took his homeroom class down to the obstacle course. The three homeroom teachers for students in their last year at the academy offered their students a rare treat: they got to pick their own teams of four for the obstacle course.

Ino, Shikamaru, Choji, and Sakura were clumped together almost before Mizuki-sensei had officially turned everybody loose to find their own teammates.

The last year at the ninja academy was the hardest, and even though they were still two whole terms between them and graduation, there had already been a lot of dropouts and dismissals from their class, and even more from the classes a term or two ahead of them in school. When the dust settled, all three classes combined only managed to field thirty-odd teams.

Sakura saw that Shino and Hinata had partnered up with two kids from another class that Sakura didn’t recognize at all. Sasuke was on an all boys team that was being cooed over by a team of girls destined for civilian life. Naruto and Kiba had somehow ended up on a team with two kids that Sakura vaguely recognized from the ninja corps. In fact, looking around, Sakura realized that she only recognized about half of the kids around her from her previous life. The others had just… disappeared.

_Were they killed? Maybe in the invasion?_ Sakura wondered. _Or did I just… not see them ever again?_

Looking at their happy little faces, Sakura sincerely hoped that they had just run in different social circles. Unfortunately, she had been a ninja too long to entirely believe it.

At Iruka-sensei’s shout, all of the teams moved to the starting line.

Sakura was seventeen and a chuunin. She had been on actual missions, fought in actual ninja battles, and killed actual enemy nin. No one in Konohagakure had killed as many Akatsuki members as she had.

And yet, as she took her place at the starting line with all the eleven, twelve, and thirteen year olds, Sakura felt her heart rate pick up. Her stomach twisted with nerves. She was actually worried about her little team doing well on a hypothetical mission on an obstacle course at the academy.

Sakura listened carefully as their instructors outlined the mission parameters.

They may have been eleven and twelve year olds, but her little team of pre-genin was going to ace this!

 


End file.
